IN THE BEGINNING . . .

Huron Indian myth has it that in ancient times, when the land was barren and the people were starving, the Great Spirit sent forth a woman to save humanity. As she traveled over the world, everywhere her right hand touched the soil, there grew potatoes. And everywhere her left hand touched the soil, there grew corn. And when the world was rich and fertile, she sat down and rested. When she arose, there grew tobacco . . .

TOBACCO TIMELINE

Copyright 1993-2001 Gene Borio

SOURCES: Thanks to tobacco researcher Larry Breed (LB) for his contributions. He recently found a little tome called "This Smoking World" (1927), and shared some of its events (TSW). I am also beginning to incorporate events referenced in Richard Kluger's monumental Ashes to Ashes (RK), The American Tobacco Story (ATS), Corti's "A History of Smoking (1931), Elizabeth Whelan's A Smoking Gun, and Susan Wagner's Cigarette Country (1971). Another important source is Bill Drake's wonderful The European Experience With Native American Tobacco (BD). Many will be interested in the 1989 Surgeon General report segment, "ADVANCES IN KNOWLEDGE OF THE HEALTH CONSEQUENCES OF SMOKING" (PDF, 93 pp).

Prelude

Prehistory: Although small amounts of nicotine may be found in some Old World plants, including belladonna and Nicotiana africana, and nicotine metabolites have been found in human remains and pipes in the Near East and Africa, there is no indication of habitual tobacco use in the Ancient world, on any continent save the Americas.

c. 6000 BCE: Experts believe the tobacco plant, as we know it today, begins growing in the Americas.

c.1 BCE: Experts believe American inhabitants have begun finding ways to use tobacco, including smoking (in a number of variations), chewing and in probably hallucinogenic enemas (by the Peruvian Aguaruna aboriginals).

c. 1 CE: Tobacco was "nearly everywhere" in the Americas. (American Heritage Book of Indians, p.41).

600-1000 CE: UAXACTUN, GUATEMALA. First pictorial record of smoking: A pottery vessel found here dates from before the 11th century. On it a Maya is depicted smoking a roll of tobacco leaves tied with a string. The Mayan term for smoking was sik'ar

On this bright morning Columbus and his men set foot on the New World for the first time, landing on the beach of San Salvador Island or Samana Cay in the Bahamas, or Gran Turk Island. The indigenous Arawaks, possibly thinking the strange visitors divine, offer gifts. Columbus wrote in his journal,

the natives brought fruit, wooden spears, and certain dried leaves which gave off a distinct fragrance.

As each item seemed much-prized by the natives; Columbus accepted the gifts and ordered them brought back to the ship. The fruit was eaten; the pungent "dried leaves" were thrown away.

1492-10-15: Columbus Mentions Tobacco. "We found a man in a canoe going from Santa Maria to Fernandia. He had with him some dried leaves which are in high value among them, for a quantity of it was brought to me at San Salvador" -- Christopher Columbus' Journal

Rodrigo de Jerez and Luis de Torres, in Cuba searching for the Khan of Cathay (China), are credited with first observing smoking. They reported that the natives wrapped dried tobacco leaves in palm or maize "in the manner of a musket formed of paper." After lighting one end, they commenced "drinking" the smoke through the other. Jerez became a confirmed smoker, and is thought to be the first outside of the Americas. He brought the habit back to his hometown, but the smoke billowing from his mouth and nose so frightened his neighbors he was imprisoned by the holy inquisitors for 7 years. By the time he was released, smoking was a Spanish craze.

1497: Robert Pane, who accompanied Christopher Columbus on his second voyage in 1493, writes the first report of native tobacco use to appear in Europe.

"All along the sea routes ... wherever they had trading posts, the Portuguese began the limited planting of tobacco. Before the end of the sixteenth century they had developed these small farms to a point where they could be assured of enough tobacco to meet their personal needs, for gifts, and for barter. By the beginning of the seventeenth century these farms had, in many places, become plantations, often under native control." -- Jerome Edmund Brooks, The mighty leaf; tobacco through the centuries. Boston, Little, Brown (1952)
JAPAN: Dutch and Portuguese trading vessels calling at ports in Nagasaki and Kagoshima introduce tobacco. It is spread through the country over the ensuing decades, often by Buddhist monks, who use tobacco seeds to pay for lodging along the routes of their pilgrimages.

1535: CANADA: Jacques Cartier encounters natives on the island of Montreal who use tobacco.

"In Hochelaga, at the head of the river in Canada, grows a certain herb which is stocked in large quantities by the natives during the summer season, and on which they set great value. Men alone use it, and after drying it in the sun they carry it around their neck wrapped up in the skin of a small animal, like a sac, with a hollow piece of stone or wood. When the spirit moves them, they pulverize this herb and place it at one end, lighting it with a fire brand, and draw on the other end so long that they fill their bodies with smoke until it comes out of their mouth and nostrils as from a chimney. They claim it keeps them warm and in good health. They never travel without this herb." --- Smoke and Mirrors, p. 30

1556: FRANCE: Tobacco is introduced. Revolutionary monk Thevet claims he was the first to transplant Nicotiana tabacum from Brazil; many dispute this. In his writings he describes tobacco as a creature comfort. (ATS)

1558: SPAIN: Tobacco is introduced by Francisco Fernandes, a physician who had been sent by Philip II. of Spain to investigate the products of Mexico. (Ency. Brit.)

1561: FRANCE: Nicot sends snuff to Catherine de Medici, Queen of France, to treat her son Francis II's migraine headaches. She later decrees tobacco be termed Herba Regina (There is confusion in sources: some claim it cured Catherine's own headaches (by making her sneeze))

1564 or 1565: ENGLAND: Tobacco is introduced into England by Sir John Hawkins and/or his crew. Tobacco is used cheifly by sailors, including those employed by Sir Francis Drake, until the 1580s. (Chroniclers of the day took little note of the customs of sailors. Crews under the command of less famous captains than Hawkins would be given even less notice. But Spanish and Portuguese sailors spread the practice around the world--probably first to fellow sailors at port cities. There is no reason to suppose Hawkins' crew particularly advanced in comparison to those on other English ships. In sum, there could well have been a small underground of seafaring tobacco users in England for decades before officialdom took notice. Hawkins and his crew are usually given the credit, but in reality, take this with a grain of sea-salt.)

1568: FRANCE: Andre Thevet writes the first description of tobacco use. In Brazil, he wrote, the people smoke it and it cleans the "superfluous humours of the brain". Thevet smoked it himself. (LB)

1570: Claimed first botanical book on tobacco written by Pena and Lobel of London.(TSW)

1571: GERMANY: MEDICINE: Dr. Michael Bernhard Valentini's Polychresta Exotica (Exotic Remedies) describes numerous different types of clysters, or enemas. The tobacco smoke clyster was said to be good for the treatment of colic, nephritis, hysteria, hernia, and dysentery.

1571: SPAIN: MEDICINE: Monardes, a doctor in Seville, reports on the latest craze among Spanish doctors--the wonders of the tobacco plant, which herbalists are growing all over Spain. Monardes lists 36 maladies tobacco cures.

1571:BOOKS: Jos de Acosta, a Spanish Jesuit missionary is sent to Peru; records some of the earliest and most vivid descriptions of Native South American life and tobacco use. ( De natura novi orbis libri duo (Salamanca, 1588-1589)

1586: GERMANY: 'De plantis epitome utilissima' offers one of first cautions to use of tobacco, calling it a "violent herb". (LB)

1586: ENGLAND: Tobacco Arrives in English Society. In July 1586, some of the Virginia colonists returned to England and disembarked at Plymouth smoking tobacco from pipes, which caused a sensation. William Camden (1551-1623) a contemporary witness, reports that "These men who were thus brought back were the first that I know of that brought into England that Indian plant which they call Tabacca and Nicotia, or Tobacco" Tobacco in the Elizabethan age was known as "sotweed." (BD)

1587: ANTWERP: First published work totally on tobacco, 'De herbe panacea', with numerous recipies and claims of cures. (LB)

1590: BOOKS: Richard Hakluyt, who accompanied Sir Walter Raleigh on his Roanoke expedition, publishes his comprehensive anthology: The Principall Navigations. Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation, Made by Sea or Overland to the Most Remote and Farthest Distant Quarters of the Earth at Any Time within the Compasse of these 1500 Years.

1592-98: KOREA: Hideyoshi Invasion from Japan. Japan, which has maintained contact with Portuguese merchants, introduce the practice of smoking to Korea.

1595: ENGLAND: BOOKS: Tabacco, the first book in the English language devoted to the subject of tobacco, is published

1595 (approx.): Matoaka is born to Chief Powhatan. She is given the nickname Pocahontas--"Frisky," "Playful One" or "Mischief"

1596: LITERATURE: Ben Jonson's Every Man in His Humor is acted on the 25th of November, 1596, and printed in 1601. In Act III, Scene 2, Bobadilla (pro) and Cob (con) argue about tobacco. (BD)

Seventeenth Century--"The Great Age of the Pipe"

When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers therefore are the founders of human civilization. -- Daniel Webster (1782-1852).

Tobacco comes into use as "Country Money" or "Country Pay" in the colonies. Tobacco continues to be used as a monetary standard--literally a "cash crop"-- throughout the 17th and 18th Centuries, lasting twice as long as the gold standard.

"So prominent is the place that tobacco occupies in the early records of the middle Southern States, that its cultivation and commercial associations may be said to form the basis of their history. It was the direct source of their wealth, and became for a while the representative of gold and silver; the standard value of other merchantable products; and this tradition was further preserved by the stamping of a tobacco-leaf upon the old continental money used in the Revolution." --19th century historian (DB)

1601: TURKEY: Smoking is introduced, and rapidly takes hold while clerics denounce it. "Puffing in each other's faces, they made the streets and markets stink," writes historian Ibrahim Pecevi.

1601 (approx): Samuel Rowlands writes,

But this same poyson, steeped India weede
In head, hart, lunges, do the soote and cobwebs breede
With that he gasp'd, and breath'd out such a smoke
That all the standers by were like to choke.

1602: ENGLAND: Publication of Worke of Chimney Sweepers by anonymous author identified as 'Philaretes' states that illness of chimney sweepers is caused by soot and that tobacco may have similar effects. (LB)

His majesty seems, however, to have advanced very substantial reasons for this virtual prohibition of tobacco; for if any circumstance can justify what are termed "strong measures" on the part of a government, certainly the wanton luxury and debauchery of its people must be amongst the best apologies for a stretch of power, which might, in other respects, have been deeed arbitrary, and unbecoming a British monarch.-- Tatham, "An Historical and Practical Essay on the Culture and Commerce of Tobacco" (1800)

1605: ENGLAND: Debate between King James I and Dr. Cheynell.(TSW)

1606: SPAIN: King Philip Ill decrees that tobacco may only be grown in specific locations--including Cuba, Santo Domingo, Venezuela and Puerto Rico. Sale of tobacco to foreigners is punishable by death.

1606+: ADVERTISING: ENGLAND: America and advertising begin to grow together. One of the first products heavily marketed is America itself. Richard Hofstadter called the Virginia Company's recruitment effort for its new colony, "one of the first concerted and sustained advertising campaigns in the history of the modern world." The out-of-place, out-of-work "gentlemen" in an overpopulated England were sold quite a bill of goods about the bountiful land and riches to be had in the New World. Daniel J. Boorstin has mused whether "there was a kind of natural selection here of those people who were willing to believe in advertising."

1610: ENGLAND: Sir Francis Bacon writes that tobacco use is increasing and that it is a custom hard to quit. (LB)

1610: ENGLAND: Edmond Gardiner publishes William Barclay's The Trial of Tobacco and provides a text of recipies and medicinal preparations. BArclay defends tobacco as a medicine but condemns casual use(LB)

1612: CHINA: Imperial edict forbidding the planting and use tobacco.(TSW)

1614-04: JAMESTOWN: John Rolfe and Rebecca (nee Pocahontas) are married

1614: ENGLAND: First sale of native Virginia tobacco in England; Virginia colony enters world tobacco market, under English protection

1614: ENGLAND: "[T]here be 7000 shops, in and about London, that doth vent Tobacco" -- The Honestie of this Age, Prooving by good circumstance that the world was never honest till now, by Barnabee Rych Gentleman (BD)

1614: ENGLAND: King James I makes the import of tobacco a Royal monopoly, available for a yearly fee of 14,000.

1614: LITERATURE: Nepenthes, or the Vertues of Tabacco, by William Barclay; Edinburgh, 1614. Touts tobacco's medicinal qualities, and recommends exclusively tobacco of American origin (BD)

1614: SPAIN: King Philip III establishes Seville as tobacco center of the world.

Attempting to prevent a tobacco glut, Philip requires all tobacco grown in the Spanish New World to be shipped to a central location, Seville, Spain. Seville becomes the world center for the production of cigars. European cigarette use begins here, as beggars patch together tobacco from used cigars, and roll them in paper(papeletes). Spanish and Portuguese sailors spread the practice to Russia and the Levant.

1616: Tobacco Nation Discovered. The French discover an Iroquoian branch of American Indians in present-day Ontario, Canada, and term them the Tobacco Nation, or Tionontati, because of their large tobacco fields. After attack by the Iroquois, the remnants of the Tobacco Nation, along with many Huron refugees, settled SW of Lake Superior. They were soon assimilated into one tribe, known as the Wyandot. In 1990 there were about 2,500 Wyandot left in the US.

1616-06-03: JAMESTOWN: John Rolfe and Pocahontas arrive in London

1617: Dr. William Vaughn writes:
Tobacco that outlandish weede
It spends the braine and spoiles the seede
It dulls the spirite, it dims the sight
It robs a woman of her right

1617: MONGOLIA: Emperor places dealth penalty on using tobacco.(TSW)

1618-48: THE THIRTY YEARS WAR spurs an expansion of smoking. (AHS)

1618-48: ENGLAND: SIR WALTER RALEIGH, popularizer of tobacco in England, is beheaded for treason. Upon Ralegh's tobacco box, found in his cell afterwards, is the inscription, "Comes meus fuit illo miserrimo tempo." ("It was my comfort in those miserable times.")

1619: ENGLAND: An unhappy King James I incorporates British pipe makers; London clay pipe makers were formed into a charter body with a coat of arm of a Moor holding a pipe and roll of tobacco. (TSW)

1619: JAMESTOWN: First Africans brought into Virginia. John Rolfe writes in his diary, "About the last of August came in a dutch man of warre that sold us twenty negars." They were needed for the booming tobacco crop, but had been baptized, so--as Christians--they could not be enslaved for life, but only indentured, just like many of the English colonists, for 5-7 years

1619: ECONOMY: Tobacco is being used as currency. It will continue to be so used for 200 years in Virginia, for 150 years in Maryland, adjusting to the vagaries of shifting values and varying qualities. (see 1727, "Tobacco Notes")

1619: JAMESTOWN: First shipment of women--meant to become wives for the settlers--arrives. A prospective husband must pay for his chosen mate's passage with 120 lbs. of tobacco.

1619-07-30: JAMESTOWN: The first representative legislative assembly in America is held. The Virginia Colony's General Assembly meets in the choir of the Jamestown church from July 30-August 4. This assembly contained the embryo of representative self-government. The first law passed is a law concerning the economics of the tobacco trade: tobacco shall not be sold for under 3 shillings per pound.

1619-12-04: BERKELEY, VA: The very first American Thanksgiving celebrates a good tobacco crop. The holiday was abandoned after the Indian Massacre of 1622.

1620s: KOREA: Within only a few decades, tobacco has become a national pastime.

1620: ENGLAND: 40,000 lbs of tobacco are imported from Virginia. (LB)

1620: ENGLAND: King James proclaims rules of tobacco growing and import: limits tobacco sales to 100 weight of tobacco per man; restricts imports to Virginia colony, and establishes stamps or seals. Quanity has risen and quality has declined so drastically that growers could get no more than 3 shillings/lb. James suggested colonists concentrate more on corn, livestock and potash.

1620: BUSINESS: Trade agreement between the Crown & Virginia Company bans commercial tobacco growing in England, in return for a 1 shilling/lb. duty on Virginia tobacco.

1620 (about): JAPAN: Prohibition in Japan (AHS)

1621: Sixty future wives arrive in Virginia and sell for 150 pounds of tobacco each. Price up since 1619.(TSW)

1624: NEW YORK CITY is born. The town of New Amsterdam was established on lower Manhattan At this time, the western area of what is now Greenwich Village, NY, is known to Native Americans as (var.) Sapponckanican-- "tobacco fields," or "land where the tobacco grows."

1628: REGULATION: SHAH SEFI punishes two merchants for selling tobacco by pouring hot lead down their throats. (TSW)

1629: FRANCE: RICHELIEU puts a Customs duty on the import of tobacco.

1629: Niewu Amsterdam's Gov. Wouter Van Twiller appropriates a farm belonging to the Dutch West India Company in the Bossen Bouwery ("Farm in the woods") area of Manhattan, in what is now Greenwich Village, and begins growing tobacco. The Minetta Spring provides water.

1633: REGULATION: TURKEY: Sultan Murad IV orders tobacco users executed as infidels. As many as 18 a day were executed. Some historians consider the ban an anti-plague measure, some a fire-prevention measure.

1638: REGULATION: CHINA: Use or distribution of tobacco is made a crime punishable by decapitation. Snuff, introduced by the Jesuits in the mid-17th century, soon became quite popular, from the court on down, and remained so during much of the Qing dynasty (mid-17th century - 1912.)

1639: REGULATION: NEW YORK CITY: Governor Kieft bans smoking in New Amsterdam

1640: The western area of what is now Greenwich Village, NY, is known to Native Americans as (var.) Sapponckanican-- "tobacco fields," or "land where the tobacco grows."

In 1629, Niewu Amsterdam's Gov. Wouter Van Twiller appropriated a farm belonging to the Dutch West India Company in the Bossen Bouwery ("Farm in the woods") area of Manhattan island, and began growing tobacco. The first Dutch references to the Indians' name for the area appear around 1640.

1642: POPE URBAN VIII'S Bull against smoking in the churches in Seville. (AHS)

1647: REGULATION: TURKEY: Tobacco ban is lifted. Pecevi writes that tobaco has now joined coffee, wine and opium as one of the four "cushions on the sofa of pleasure."

1647: REGULATION: Colony of Connecticut bans public smoking: citizens may smoke only once a day, "and then not in company with any other."

1648: Smoking generally prohibited. Writers now hostile to it. (AHS)

1650: REGULATION: Colony of Connecticut General Court orders -- no smoking by person under age of 21, no smoking except with physicians order.(TSW)

. . . a contract whereby the exclusive right to import, manufacture, and trade in tobacco was farmed out [by the state] to a private person for a certain consideration

(AHS)

1660: ITALY: Pope ALEXANDER VII farms out tobacco monopolies

1660: ENGLAND: THE RESTORATION OF THE MONARCHY The court of Charles II returns to London from exile in Paris, bringing the French court's snuffing practice with them; snuff becomes an aristocratic form of tobacco use. During Charles' reign (1660-1685), the growing of tobacco in England, except for small lots in physic gardens, is forbidden so as to preserve the taxes coming in from Virginian imports..

1660: The Navigation Act mandates that 7 enumerated items--one of which was tobacco--may only be shipped to England or its colonies.

1661: VIRGINIA Assembly begins institutionalizing slavery, making it de jure.

1665-66: HEALTH: EUROPE: THE GREAT PLAGUE Smoking tobacco is thought to have a protective effect. Smoking is made compulsory at Eton to ward off infection.

1665: HEALTH: ENGLAND: Samuel Pepys describes a Royal Society experiment in which a cat quickly dies when fed "a drop of distilled oil of tobacco."

1666: AGRICULTURE: Maryland faces oversupply; bans production of tobacco for one year.

1670: AUSTRIA: COUNT KHEVENHILLER's appalto is established.

1674: RUSSIA: Smoking Can Carry the Death Penalty.

1674: FRANCE: LOUIS XIV establishes a tobacco monopoly.

1675: REGULATION: SWITZERLAND: The Berne town council establishes a special Chambres de Tabac to deal with smokers, who face the same dire penalties as adulterers.

1676: RUSSIA: the smoking ban is lifted.

1676: TAXES: Heavy taxes levied in tobacco by Virginia Governor BERKELEY lead to BACON'S REBELLION, a foretaste of American Revolution. (ATS)

1679: Abraham a Santa Clara and the plague in Vienna.

1682: VIRGINIA: The Tobacco Riots

1683: Massachusetts passes the nation's first no-smoking law. It forbids the smoking of tobacco outdoors, because of the fire danger. Soon after, Philadelphia lawmakers approve a ban on "smoking seegars on the street." Fines are used to buy fire-fighting equipment.

1689-1725: RUSSIA: PETER THE GREAT advocates smoking, repeals bans.

1693: ENGLAND: Smoking banned in Commons chamber: "no member do presume to take tobacco in the gallery of the House or at a committee table"

1698: RUSSIA: PETER THE GREAT establishes a trade monopoly with the English, against Church wishes.

I701-40: PRUSSIA: Tobacco councils of Frederick I and Frederick William I. (AHS)

1705: VIRGINIA Assembly passes a law legalizing lifelong slavery. . . . all servants imported and brought into this country, by sea or land, who were not christians in their native country . . . shall be . . . slaves, and as such be here bought and sold notwithstanding a conversion to christianity afterwards."

1727: ECONOMY: "Tobacco notes" Become Legal Tender in Virginia. Tobacco Notes attesting to quality and quantity of one's tobacco kept in public warehouses are authorized as legal tender in Virginia. Used as units of monetary exchange throughout 18th Century. The notes are more convenient than the acutal leaf, which had been in use as money for over a century.

1730: LEGISLATION: Virginia Inspection Acts come into effect, standardizing and regulating tobacco sales and exports to prevent the export of "trash tobacco"--shipments diluted with leaves and household sweepings, which were debasing the value of Virginia tobacco. Inspection warehouses were empowered to verify weight and kind and kind of tobacco.

1758: LEGISLATION: Virginia Assembly passes wildly unpopular "Two Penny Act," forbidding payment in percentage of tobacco crop to some public officials, such as the Anglican clergy. The crop was small at this period, making tobacco a seller's market. The law mandating a regular salary for these officials severely cut the clergy's real income.

1759: GEORGE WASHINGTON, having gained 17,000 acres of farmland and 286 slaves from his new wife, MARTHA DANDRIDGE CUSTIS (these added to his own 30 slaves), harvests his first tobacco crop. The British market is unimpressed with its quality, and by 1761, Washington is deeply in debt.

1760: BUSINESS: Pierre Lorillard establishes a "manufactory" in New York City for processing pipe tobacco, cigars, and snuff. P. Lorillard is the oldest tobacco company in the US.

1761: HEALTH: ENGLAND: Physician John Hill publishes "Cautions against the Immoderate Use of Snuff" -- perhaps the first clinical study of tobacco effects. Hill warns snuff users they are vulnerable to cancers of the nose.

1761: HEALTH: ENGLAND: Dr. Percival Pott notes incidence of cancer of the scrotum among chimneysweeps, theorizing a connection between cancer and exposure to soot.

1762: General Israel Putnam introduces cigar-smoking to the US. After a British campaign in Cuba, "Old Put" returns with three donkey-loads of Havana cigars; introduces the customers of his Connecticut brewery and tavern to cigar smoking (BD)

1763: Patrick Henry argues a tobacco case, the "Parson's Cause."

The clergy had been paid in tobacco until a late 1750s Virginia law which decreed they should be paid in currency at the fixed rate of 2 cent/lb. When tobacco began selling for 6 cents/lb, the clergy protested, and the law was vetoed by the Crown. The old Virginia law was still sometimes adhered to, however, and some clergy sued their parishes. Henry defended one such parish (Hanover County) in court. He berated England's interference in domestic matters, and convinced the jury to give the plaintiff/clergyman only one penny in damages.

1770: Demuth Tobacco shop, the oldest tobacco shop in the nation is established by Christopher Demuth at 114 E. King St., Lancaster, PA.

1771-12-17: REGULATION: FRANCE: French official is condemned to be hanged for admitting foreign tobacco into the country.

1776: AMERICAN REVOLUTION Along "Tobacco Coast" (the Chesapeake), the Revolutionary War was variously known as "The Tobacco War." Growers had found themselves perpetually in debt to British merchants; by 1776, growers owed the mercantile houses millions of pounds. British tobacco taxes are a further grievance. Tobacco helps finance the Revolution by serving as collateral for the loan Benjamin Franklin won from France--the security was 5 million pounds of Virginia tobacco. George Washington once appealed to his countrymen for aid to the army: "If you can't send money, send tobacco." During the war, it was tobacco exports that the fledgling government used to build up credits abroad. And, when the war was over, Americans turned to tobacco taxes to help repay the revolutionary war debt.

1781: Thomas Jefferson suggests tobacco cultivation in the "western country on the Mississippi." (ATS)

1788: BUSINESS: Spanish NEW ORLEANS opened for export of tobacco by Americans in Mississippi valley. (ATS)

1789-1799: FRENCH REVOLUTION French masses begin to take to the cigarito, as the form of tobacco use least like the aristocratic snuff. The hated tobacco monopoly is abolished (to be resurrected by Napoleon)

1791: HEALTH: ENGLAND: London physician John Hill reports cases in which use of snuff caused nasal cancers

.

1794: TAXES: The U.S Congress passes the first federal excise tax on tobacco products. The tax of 8 cents applies only to snuff, not the more plebian chewing or smoking tobacco. The tax is 60% of snuff's usual selling price. James Madison opposed the tax, saying it deprive poorer people of innocent gratification

1798. HEALTH: Famed physician Benjamin Rush writes on the medical dangers of tobacco and claims that smoking or chewing tobacco leads to drunkenness.

1798. The United States Marine Hospital Service is established. The service will become the Public Health Service in 1912 and had been made part of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in 1953.

The Nineteenth Century--The Age of the Cigar

1800s: FRANCE: "Lorettes" -- prostitutes near the Notre Dame de Lorettes church--are the first women to smoke publicly.

1805-12-25: LEWIS AND CLARK: First Christmas in the Northwest. The Lewis & Clark party, having built a winter encampment at Fort Clatsop (OR), celebrates Christmas. Clark writes: "at day light this morning we we[re] awoke by the discharge of the fire arm of all our party & a Selute, Shoute and a Song which the whole party joined in under our windows, after which they retired to their rooms were Chearfull all the morning-- after brackfast we divided our Tobacco which amounted to 12 carrots one half of which we gave to the men of the party who used tobacco, and to those who doe not use it we make a present of a handkerchief."

1806-03-07: LEWIS AND CLARK. Patrick Gass, holed up with the expedition in Fort Clatsup, OR, writes, "Among our other difficulties, we now experience the want of tobacco. We use crabtree bark as a substitute."

1826: ENGLAND is importing 26 pounds of cigars a year. The cigar becomes so popular that within four years, England will be importing 250,000 pounds of cigars a year.

1827: ENGLAND: First friction match invented. Chemist John Walker calls his invention "Congreves," after the rocket maker. Later they became known as "lucifers", then "matches."

1828: GERMANY: Heidelberg students Ludwig Reimann and Wilhelm Heinrich Posselt are credited with first isolating nicotine in a pure form; write exhaustive dissertations on the pharmacology of nicotine, concluding it is a "dangerous poison."

1830s: First organized anti-tobacco movement in US begins as adjunct to the temperance movement. Tobacco use is considered to dry out the mouth, "creating a morbid or diseased thirst" which only liquor could quench..

1830: PRUSSIA: Prussian Government enacts a law that cigars , in public, be smoked in a sort of wire-mesh contraption designed to prevent sparks setting fire to ladies' "crinolines" and hoop skirts. (BD)

1832: TURKEY: Invention of the paper-rolled cigarette? While Southwest Indians, Aztecs and Mayans had used hollow reeds, cane or maize to fashion cylindrical tobacco-holders, and Sevillians had rolled cigar-scraps in thrown-away paper (papeletes), an Egyptian artilleryman [in the Turk/Egyptian war] is credited with the invention of the cigarette as we know it. In the siege of Acre, the Egyptian's cannon crew had improved their rate of fire by rolling the gunpowder in paper tubes. For this, he and his crew were rewarded with a pound of tobacco. Their sole pipe was broken, however, so they took to rolling the pipe tobacco in the paper. The invention spread among both Egyptian and Turkish soldiers. And thus . . . (Good-Bye to All That, 1970)

1832: AGRICULTURE: TUCK patents curing method for Virginia leaf.

1832: BOOKS: Domestinc Manners of the Americans by Frances Trollope

1833-02-27 RELIGION: In Kirtland, OH, Mormon founder Joseph Smith announces to church leaders that God opposes strong drinks, hot drinks and tobacco. This proclamation becomes known as the "Word of Wisdom," but considered as counsel or advice, rather than a commandment.

1832: BOOKS: American Notes by Charles Dickens

1836: USA: Samuel Green of the New England Almanack and Farmers Friend writes that tobacco is an insectide, a poison, a fillthy habit, and can kill a man. (LB)

1839: AGRICULTURE: NORTH CAROLINA: SLADE "yallercure" presages flue-cured Bright tobacco. Charcoal used in flue-curing for the first time in North Carolina. Not only cheaper, its intense heat turns the thinner, low-nicotine Piedmont leaf a brilliant golden color. This results in the classic American "Bright leaf" variety, which is so mild it virtually invites a smoker to inhale it.(RK), (ATS) (Legend has it that one night, an 18-year-old slave named Peter was assigned to keep watch over a barn of tobacco on the Slade Farm, tending the fire, feeding it just enough wood to push a steady, smoky heat through the barn. He fell asleep, and only woke up after a rainstorm had cooled the barn--and drenched his wood. Desperate, he got some charcoal from the blacksmith shop and used it to superheat the barn. This process accidentally turned the tobacco golden, and imbued it with a mild, buttery taste. Thus was the bright-leaf tobacco industry was born.)

1843: MEDICINE: The correct molecular formula of nicotine is established

1845: JOHN QUINCY ADAMS writes to the Rev. Samuel H. Cox: "In my early youth I was addicted to the use of tobacco in two of its mysteries, smoking and chewing. I was warned by a medical friend of the pernicious operation of this habit upon the stomach and the nerves.''

1845: BOOKS: Prosper Merimee's novel, Carmen, about a cigarette girl in an Andalusian factory, is published

1846-1848: MEXICAN WAR US soldiers bring back from the Southwest a taste for the darker, richer tobacco favored in Latin countries--cigarros and cigareillos--leading to an explosive increase in the use of the cigar. (The South remains firmly attached to chewing tobacco.)

1849: BUSINESS: J.E. Liggett and Brother is established in St. Louis, Mo., by John Edmund Liggett

1849: CALIFORNIA GOLD RUSH: One commentator writes of this period: "I have seen purer liquors, better seegars, finer tobacco, truer guns and pistols, larger dirks and bowie knives, and prettier cortezans, here in San Francisco than in any place I have ever visited, and it is my unbiased opinion that California can and does furnish the best bad things that are obtainable in America."

1852:Washington Duke, a young tobacco farmer, builds a modest, two-story home near Durham, NC, for himself and his new bride. The house, and the log structure which served as a "tobacco factory" after the Civil War may still be seen at the Duke Homestead Museum.

1852: Matches are introduced, making smoking more convenient.

1853-1856: EUROPE: CRIMEAN WAR British soldiers learn how cheap and convenient the cigarettes ("Papirossi") used by their Turkish allies are, and bring the practise back to England. The story goes that the English captured a Russian train loaded with provisions--including cigarettes...

1854: ENGLAND: BUSINESS: London tobacconist Philip Morris begins making his own cigarettes. Old Bond Street soon becomes the center of the retail tobacco trade.

1854: FRIEDRICH TIEDEMANN writes the first exhaustive treatment on tobacco.

1855: J.E. Lundstrom invents the safety match, which requires a special striking surface.

1855: "Annual Report of the New York Anti-Tobacco Society for 1855" calls tobacco a "fashionable poison," warns against addiction and claims half of all deaths of smokers between 35 and 50 were caused by smoking.

1856-1857: ENGLAND: A running debate among readers about the health effects of tobacco runs in the British medical journal, Lancet. The argument runs as much along moral as medical lines, with little substantiation.(RK)

1856-1857: ENGLAND: The country's first cigarette factory is opened by Crimean vet Robert Gloag, manufacturing "Sweet Threes" (GTAT)

1856: PEOPLE: James Buchanan "Buck" Duke is born to Washington "Wash" Duke, an independent farmer who hated the plantation class, opposed slavery, and raised food and a little tobacco.

1858: Treaty of Tianjin allows cigarettes to be imported into China duty free

1858: First Chinese Immigrant arrives in New York City, Sells Cigars. Ah Ken moves into a house on Mott St., opens a cigar store on Park Row. ( Low Life, Sante, 1991)

1859: Reverend George Trask publishes tract "Thoughts and stories for American Lads: Uncle Toby's anti-tobacco advice to his nephew Billy Bruce". He writes, "Physicians tell us that twenty thousand or more in our own land are killed by [tobacco] every year (LB)

1860: The Census for Virginia and North Carolina list 348 tobacco factories, virtually all producing chewing tobacco. Only 6 list smoking tobacco as a side-product (which is manufactured from scraps left over from plug production).

1860: BUSINESS: Manufactured cigarettes appear. A popular early brand is Blackwell Tobacco Company's Bull Durham, which rose to become the most famous brand in world, and gave rise to the term "bull pen" for a baseball dugout.

1860: BUSINESS: MARKETING: Lorillard wraps $100 bills at random in packages of cigarette tobacco named "Century," in order to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the firm (BD)

1861-1865: USA: THE CIVIL WAR: Tobacco is given with rations by both North and South; many Northerners are introduced to tobacco this way. During Sherman's march, Union soldiers, now attracted to the mild, sweet "bright" tobacco of the South, raided warehouses--including Washington Duke's--for some chew on the way home. Some bright made it all the way back. Bright tobacco becomes the rage in the North.

1862: THE CIVIL WAR: First federal USA tax on tobacco; instituted to help pay for the Civil War, yields about three million dollars.(TSW)

1875: ART: Georges Bizet's opera, Carmen, based on Merimee's novel about a cigarette girl in an Andalusian factory, opens.

1876: CENNTENNIAL CELEBRATION: PHILADELPHIA: Allen & Ginter's cigarette displays are so impressive that some writers thought the Philadelphia exposition marked the birth of the cigarette as well as the telephone. (CC)

1876: Benson & Hedges receives its first royal warrant from Edward VII, Prince of Wales.

1878: BUSINESS: Trading cards and coupons begin being widely used in cigarette packs. Edward Bok suggested to a manufacturer that the blank "cardboard stiffeners" in the "cigarette sandwich', might have biographies on one side and pictures on the other. The American News Company-distributed Marquis of Lorne cigarettes were the first to have the new picture cards in each pack (GTAT)

1880: ENGLAND: BUSINESS: Leopold Morris buys Margaret's share of the Philip Morris business, and brings in a new partner.

1880s: USA: Women's Christian Temperance Movement publishes a "Leaflet for Mothers' Meetings" titled "Narcotics", by Lida B. Ingalls. Discusses evils of tobacco, especially cigarettes. Cigarettes are "doing more to-day to undermine the constitution of our young men and boys than any other one evil" (p. 7). (LB)

1880s: ADVERTISING: Improvements in transportation, manufacturing volume, and packaging lead to the ability to sell the same branded product nationwide. What can be sold nationwide can and must be advertised nationwide. Advertising agencies sprout like wildflowers. The most advertised product throughout most of the 19th century: elixirs and patent medicines of the "cancer cure" variety.

1880s: ENGLAND: BUSINESS: Mssrs. Richard Benson and William Hedges open a tobacconist shop near Philip Morris in London.(RK)

In .St. Louis, when retailers ignored him, Small advertised for a saleswoman. A petite, thin-lipped widow, a Mrs. Leonard, applied for the job and was accepted. This little stunt gave the Dukes thousands of dollars of free publicity in the local newspapers.

1883: US ends the 1862 Civil War excise tax on cigars, helping to usher in a 40-year Golden Age of cigar smoking.

1884: BUSINESS: Duke heads to New York City to take his tobacco business national and form a cartel that eventually becomes the American Tobacco Co. Duke buys 2 Bonsack machines., getting one of them to produce 120,000 cigarettes in 10 hours by the end of the year. In this year Duke produces 744 million cigarettes, more than the national total in 1883. Duke's airtight contracts with Bonsack allow him to undersell all competitors.

1887: USA: Two men held pipe smoking contest that lasted one and a half hours. Victory was declared when one man filled his pipe for the tenth time, his oppenent did not. (LB)

1887: BUSINESS: His contracts with Bonsack unknown to his competitors, Buck Duke slashes prices, sparking a price war he knew he'd win.

1887: BUSINESS: Connorton's Tobacco Brand Directory of the United States lists St. Louis as No. 1 in tobacco output.

1889: SCIENCE: Nicotine and nerve cells reported on. Langley and Dickinson publish landmark studies on the effects of nicotine on the ganglia; they hypothesize that there are receptors and transmitters that respond to stimulation by specific chemicals. (RK)

c.1890s: INDONESIA: BUSINESS: "Kretek" cigarettes invented. The story is that Noto Semito of Kudus was desperate to cure his asthma. He rolled tobacco mixed with crushed cloves in dried corn leaves--and cured his respiratory ailments. He then Began manufacturing clove cigarettes under the name BAL TIGA (Three Balls). He became a millionaire, but competition was so fierce he eventurally died penniless in 1953.

1890: "Tobacco" appears in the US Pharmacopoeia, an official government listing of drugs.

1890: REGULATION: 26 states and territories have outlawed the sale of cigarettes to minors (age of a "minor" in a particulary state could be anything from 14-24.)

1890: REGULATION: PAKISTAN: The Railways Act prohibits smoking in railway compartments without the consent of fellow passengers. (Repealed in 1959 by then-provicial governemtn of West Pakistan)

1890: BUSINESS: Dukes establish the American Tobacco Company, which will soon monopolize the entire US tobacco industry. ATC will be dissolved in Anti-Trust action in 1911.

1890: LITERATURE: My Lady Nicotine, by Sir James Barrie, London

1892: REGULATION: Reformers petition Congress to prohibit the manufacture, importation and sale of cigarettes. The Senate Committee on Epidemic Diseases, while agreeing that cigarettes are a public health hazard, finds that only the states have the authority to act. The committee urges the petitioners to seek redress from state legislatures.

1892: BUSINESS: Book matches are invented, but are a technological failure. Since the striking surface was inside the book, all the matches caught fire often. By 1912, the technology would be perfected.

1893: SCIENCE: Pure nicotine is first synthesized by Pictet and Crepieux.

1893: REGULATION: The state of Washington bans the sale and use of cigarettes. The law is overturned on constitutional grounds as a restraint of free trade.

1894: BUSINESS: By now, Philip Morris passes from the troubled Morris family, to the control of William Curtis Thompson and his family (RK).

1894: BUSINESS: Brown & Williamson formed as a partnership in Winston-Salem, NC,, making mostly plug, snuff and pipe tobacco. (RK).

1894: LITERATURE: Under Two Flags by Ouida (Louise de la Ramee). Cigarette, the waif heroine "Rides like an Arab, Smokes like a Zouave." Cigarette is describes as "Enfant de L'armee, Femme de la Fume, Soldat de la France."

1895: ADVERTISING: First known motion picture commercial is made, an ad for Admiral cigarettes produced by Thomas A. Edison's company.

1896: REGULATION: Smoking banned in the House; chewing still allowed

1898: SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR: Congress raises taxes on cigarettes 200%

1898: LITIGATION: Tennessee Supreme Court upholds a total ban on cigarettes, ruling they are "not legitimate articles of commerce, because wholly noxious and deleterious to health. Their use is always harmful."

1899: Lucy Payne Gaston, who claims that young men who smoke develop a distinguishable "cigarette face," founds the Chicago Anti-Cigarette League, which grows by 1911 to the Anti-Cigarette League of America, and by 1919 to the Anti-Cigarette League of the World.

1899: BUSINESS: Benson & Hedges open a tony shop on 5th Avenue in New York City, providing elegant cigarettes for the carriage trade.

1899: BUSINESS: Liggett & Myers taken into Duke's Tobacco Trust. Duke has finally won the Bull Durham brand of chew. Bull Durham is the most famous trademark in the world, giving rise to the term ³bull pen² (from a Bull Durham ad painted behind the Yankees¹ dugout), and ³shooting the bull² (most likely from chewing tobacco). The bull was advertised all over the world, and even painted on the Great Pyramid of Egypt.

1899: BUSINESS: KOREA: Korea Tobacco and Ginseng (KTG) is founded as a state monopoly on ginseng. The monopoly was expanded to include tobacco in 1921.

1900: REGULATION: Washington, Iowa, Tennessee and North Dakota have outlawed the sale of cigarettes.

1900: CONSUMPTION: 4.4 billion cigarettes are sold this year. The anti-cigarette movement has destroyed many smaller companies. Buck Duke is selling 9 out of 10 cigarettes in the US.

1900: REGULATION: US Supreme Court uphold's Tennessee's ban on cigarette sales. One Justice, repeating a popular notion of the day, says, "there are many [cigarettes] whose tobacco has been mixed with opium or some other drug, and whose wrapper has been saturated in a solution of arsenic.".

1901: REGULATION: Strong anti-cigarette activity in 43 of the 45 states. "[O]nly Wyoming and Louisiana had paid no attention to the cigarette controversy, while the other forty-three states either already had anti-cigarette laws on the books, were considering new or tougher anti-cigarette laws, or were the scenes of heavy anti- cigarette activity" (Dillow, 1981:10).

1901: ENGLAND: END OF AN AGE: QUEEN VICTORIA DIES. Edward VII, the tobacco-hating queen's son and successor, gathers friends together in a large drawing room at Buckingham Palace. He enters the room with a lit cigar in his hand and announces, "Gentlemen, you may smoke."

1901: ENGLAND: BUSINESS: By royal warrant, Philip Morris & Co., Ltd., is appointed tobacconist for King Edward VII.

1901: BUSINESS: UK: Duke's Consolidated buys the British Ogden tobacco firm, signalling a raid on the British industry.

1901: CONSUMPTION: 3.5 billion cigarettes and 6 billion cigars are sold. Four in five American men smoke at least one cigar a day.

1901-12-10: BUSINESS: UK: Incorporation of The Imperial Tobacco Co. of Great Britain and Ireland Ltd; Imperial is born. 13 of the largest British tobacco companies, including W.D. & H.O. Wills, unite to combat Duke's take-over, and form the Bristol-based Imperial Tobacco Co.

1902: BUSINESS: In an end to the war, Imperial Tobacco (UK) and Buck Duke's American Tobacco Co. (USA) agree to stay in their own countries, and unite to form a joint venture, the British American Tobacco Company (BAT) to sell both companies' brands abroad.

1902: Spring: Topsy, the ill-tempered Coney Island elephant, kills J. F. Blount, a keeper, who tried to feed a lighted cigarette to her. She picked him up with her trunk and dashed him to the ground, killing him instantly. On January 5, 1903, 1500 watch Topsy's electrocution in Coney Island.

1903-08: The August Harpers Weekly says, "A great many thoughtful and intelligent men who smoke don't know if it does them good or harm. They notice bad effects when they smoke too much. They know that having once acquired the habit, it bothers them . . . to have their allowance of tobacco cut off."

1904: BUSINESS: Cigarette coupons first used as "come ons" for a new chain of tobacco stores.

1904: BUSINESS: Duke forms the American Tobacco Co. by the merger of 2 subsidiaries, Consolidated and American & Continental. The only form of tobacco Duke does not control is cigars--the form with the most prestige.

1904: MEDICINE: The first laboratory synthesis of nicotine is reported

1904: New York: A judge sends a woman is sent to jail for 30 days for smoking in front of her children.

1904: New York CIty. A woman is arrested for smoking a cigarette in an automobile. "You can't do that on Fifth Avenue," the arresting officer says

1904: Kentucky tobacco farmers form a violent "protective association" to protect themselves against rapacious tactics of large manufacturers, mostly the Duke combine. They destroy tobacco factories, crops, and even murder other planters. Disbanded in 1915.

1905: U.S. warships head to Nicaragua on behalf of William Albers, a Amaerican accused of evading tobacco taxes

1905: BUSINESS: ATC acquires R.A. Patterson's Lucky Strike company.

1905: REGULATION: "Tobacco" does not appear in the US Pharmacopoeia, an official government listing of drugs. "The removal of tobacco from the Pharmacopoeia was the price that had to be paid to get the support of tobacco state legislators for the Food and Drug Act of 1906. The elimination of the word tobacco automatically removed the leaf from FDA supervision."--Smoking and Politics: Policymaking and the Federal Bureaucracy Fritschler, A. Lee. 1969, p. 37

1906 BUSINESS: Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company is formed

1906 BUSINESS: R.J. Reynolds introduces Prince Albert pipe tobacco

1906-06-30: FEDERAL FOOD AND DRUGS ACT of 1906 prohibits sale of adulterated foods and drugs, and mandates honest statement of contents on labels. Food and Drug Administration begins. Originally, nicotine is on the list of drugs; after tobacco industry lobbying efforts, nicotine is removed from the list.

Definition of a drug includes medicines and preparations listed in U.S. Pharmacoepia or National Formulary.
1914 interpretation advised that tobacco be included only when used to cure, mitigate, or prevent disease.

1907: Business owners are refusing to hire smokers. On August 8, the New York Times writes: "Business ... is doing what all the anti-cigarette specialists could not do."

1907: In 1907, the American Tobacco Company signed a contract with the operator of a
horse-drawn stage line in New York to lease advertising space. One very controversial
ad appeared for "Bull" Durham, the nation's leading tobacco brand. "Onlookers were
shocked at the sight of the bull's well-endowed maleness so graphically rendered, and
had the driver of the first stage that appeared on the street arrested." The City of New
York sued the coach company and its client, the American Tobacco Company, to ban
the ads. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court in 1911, which upheld New
York's ban. Ironically, this case ruling took place the day after the same court handed
down a historic verdict ordering the dissolution of the Buck Duke's $240 million-a-year
American Tobacco Company monopoly, which the court deemed in violation of the
Sherman Antitrust Act. --Moyer, D. The Tobacco Reference Guide http://new.globalink.org/tobacco/trg/Chapter4/Chap4Page52.html

1907-01-26: REGULATION: THE TILLMAN ACT. Congress enacts law prohibiting campaign contributions by corporations to candidates for national posts. However, no restrictions were placed on the individuals who owned or managed the corporations. Enforcement was imposssible.

"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today."--Theodore Roosevelt

1908: CANADA: LEGISLATION: The Tobacco Restraint Act passed. Bans sales of cigarettes to those under 16; never enforced.

1908: ENGLAND: Legislation to prohibit the sales of tobacco to under 16s -- based on the belief that smoking stunts childrens growth

1909: 15 states have passed legislation banning the sale of cigarettes.

1909: SPORTS: Baseball great Honus Wagner orders American Tobacco Company take his picture off their "Sweet Caporal" cigarette packs, fearing they would lead children to smoke. The shortage makes the Honus Wagner card the most valuable of all time, worth close to $500,000.

1910: CONSUMPTION: Per capita cigarette consumption: 94/year. Per capita cigar consumption: 77/year. (International Smoking Statistice) Because of the heavy use of the inexpensive cigarette by immigrants, New York still accounts for 25% of all cigarette sales. A New York Times editorial praises the Non Smokers Protective League, saying anything that could be done to allay "the general and indiscriminate use of tobacco in public places, hotels, restaurants, and railroad cars, will receive the approval of everybody whose approval is worth having." (RK)

Leading National Brand: Fatima, (first popular brand to be sold in 20-unit packs; 15 cents) from Liggett & Myers, a Turkish/domestic blend. Most popular in Eastern urban areas. Other Turkish/domesitc competitors: Omar (ATC); Zubelda (Lorillard); Even the straight domestic brands were seasoned with a sprinkling of Turkish, like Sweet Caporals (originally made for F.S. Kinney and later for American Tobacco)

Leading Brand in Southeast: Piedmont, an all-Bright leaf brand.

Leading Brand in New Orleans: Home Run, (5 cents for 20) an all-Burley leaf brand.

1911: Tobacco -growing is allowed in England for the first time in more than 250 years.

1911: American Tobacco Co. establishes a Research Department.

1911-08-03: PUBLISHING: LIFE MAGAZINE's cover features a diapered baby girl smoking one of her mother's cigarettes. The caption: "My Lady Nicotine."

1912: BUSINESS: Book matches are finally perfected by Diamond Co. Now the appeal, in portability and ease of use, of cigarettes is even greater.

1912: BUSINESS: The IMPERIAL TOBACCO COMPANY OF CANADA is incorporated with the assistance of British-American Tobacco (which had been created by the joining of Imperial Tobacco and American Tobacco) to produce and market tobacco products across Canada

1912: BUSINESS: George Whelan puts his United Cigar Stores company under a holding company, Tobacco Products Corporation, and starts buying small tobacco independents.

1912: USA: Reprint of report of the perfection of a nicotine oil spray. This makes it easier to apply the nicotine extract as an insecticde to plants. (LB)

1912: USA: The members of the Non-Smokers' Protective League received editorial ridicule in various newspapers. One newspaper states, "Smoking may be offensive to some people, but ecourages peace and morality". Pipes and cigars are easily defended, but cigarettes may be a problem. (LB)

1912: HEALTH: First strong link made between lung cancer and smoking. In a monograph, Dr. Isaac Adler is the first to strongly suggest that lung cancer is related to smoking.

1912: USA: Article on substitutes for tobacco, such as ground coffee, coffee bean, hemp, leaves of the tomato or potato or holly or camphor, or "the egg plant, and the colt's foot". (LB)

1912: USA: Article titled "How some men stop smoking"; in which they never stop for more than a few hours. The question is raised, "How can we break ourselves of it? -- not the tobacco, but the thought that we ought to stop it?" (LB)

1912: MEDICINE: The first lobectomy--removal of a lobe of the lung--for lung cancer is accomplished in London by surgeon Hugh Morriston Davies. The patient dies 8 days later because the lung cavity is not drained, a procedure not followed in such cases until 1929.

1912: SINKING OF THE TITANIC Men in tuxedos are observed smoking cigarettes as they await their fate. (RK)

1912: REGULATION: TRADING WITH THE ENEMY ACT. It is under this act that present-day Cuban cigar smugglers would be prosecuted. It carries a maximum penalty of $250,000 and 10 years in jail.

1912: The UNITED STATES MARINE HOSPITAL SERVICE becomes the PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE.

1912: BUSINESS: ENGLAND: Walter Molins and his son, Desmond form MOLINS MACHINE CO. LTD., specializing in the making of cigarette machinery.

1912: BUSINESS: PERCIVAL S. HILL becomes president of The AMERICAN TOBACCO COMPANY

1913: AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR THE CONTROL OF CANCER is formed to inform the public about the disease. It will later become the AMERICAN CANCER SOCIETY.(RK)

1914: REGULATION: Smoking is banned in the US Senate chamber because a senator recovering from a stroke complained of irritated lungs; chewing is still allowed.

1914: BUSINESS: Peak of the cigar industry: there are 24,000 cigar factories in the US, including hundreds in Brooklyn, NY.

1914: BUSINESS: BRAZIL: BAT acquires Souza Cruz.

1914: OPINION: Thomas Edison writes to Henry Ford that the health danger of cigarettes actually lies in "the burning paper wrapper" which emits acrolein. Acrolein has an irreversible "violent action on the nerve centers, producing degeneration of the cells of the brain, which is quite rapid among boys. . . I employ no person who smokes."

1914: BOOKS: "The Social History of Smoking", by G. L. Apperson (London)

1915: POETRY:Tobacco is a dirty weed. I like it.
It satisfies no normal need. I like it.
It makes you thin, it makes you lean,
It takes the hair right off your bean.
It's the worst darn stuff I've ever seen.
I like it. --Graham Lee Hemminger, Penn State Froth, Tobacco

c. 1915: OPINION: Release of poster with quote from biologist Davis Starr Jordan, "The boy who smokes cigarettes need not be anxious about his future, he has none" (LB)

1916: BUSINESS: To compete with the phenomenal success of RJR's Camel, American introduces Lucky Strike, the name revived from an 1871 pipe tobacco brand that referenced the Gold Rush days. On the package, the motto: "It's Toasted!" (like all other cigarettes.) .

1917: BUSINESS: There are now 3 standard brands of cigarettes on the US market: Lucky Strike, Camel and Chesterfield. R.J. Reynolds suspects American Tobacco of disseminating rumors of salt petre in tobacco, and factor workers with leprosy and syphilis. Claims that agents would enter streetcars, one from the front and one from the rear, and hold a loud conversation about these...and then exit to repeat again and again. R.J. Reynolds posts $500 reward notices. (Pollay)

1918: BUSINESS: CHINA: American-Chinese Tobacco Co. (meiguo-zhongguo yancao gongsi) formed for the "sole purpose of buying tobacco in the US and selling it to China" ["The Tobacco Project"]

1919: HEALTH: Washington University medical student Alton Ochsner is summoned to observe lung cancer surgery--something, he is told, he may never see again. He doesn't see another case for 17 years. Then he sees 8 in six months--all smokers who had picked up the habit in WW I.

1919: Vice President Thomas Marshall says, "What this country really needs is a good 5-cent cigar."

1920-10: OPINION: "" in Atlantic Monthly says, "scientific truth" has found "that the claims of those who inveigh aginst tobacco are wholy without foundation has been proved time and again by famous chemists, physicians, toxicologists, physiologists, and experts of every nation and clime." (RK)

1921: BUSINESS: RJR spends $8 million in advertising, mostly on Camel; inaugurates the "I'd Walk a Mile for a Camel" slogan. (RK)

1922: PEOPLE: Lucy Payne Gaston runs for President of the U.S. against "cigarette face" Warren G. Harding, whom she asks to quit smoking. Within two years they both will be dead, he of a stroke mid-term, she of throat cancer. (There is no record of her ever having smoked.)

1923: BUSINESS: MARKET SHARE: Camel has 45% of the US market.

1923: NEW JERSEY: A Secaucus teacher's attempt to get her job back after being fired for cigarette smoking reaches the state Supreme Court, but fails

1923: LITERATURE: "Confessions of Zeno" by Italo Svevo

1923: MARKET SHARE: Camel has over 40% of the US market.

1924: Lucy Payne Gaston dies of throat cancer.

1924: CONSUMPTION: 73 billion cigarettes sold in US

1924: Reader's Digest publishes "Does Tobacco Injure the Human Body," the beginning of a RD campaign to make people think before starting to smoke.

1925: BUSINESS: Philip Morris' Marlboro, "Mild as May," targets "decent, respectable" women. "Has smoking any more to do with a woman's morals than has the color of her hair?" A 1927 ad reads, "Women quickly develop discerning taste. That is why Marlboros now ride in so many limousines, attend so many bridge parties, and repose in so many handbags."

1925: BUSINESS: Both Percival Hill and Buck Duke die by end of the year; Duke was 69. George Washington Hill becomes President of American Tobacco Co. Becomes known for creating the slogans, "Reach for a Lucky" and "With men who know tobacco best, it's Luckies two to one"

1925: SOCIETY: Women's college Bryn Mawr lifts its ban on smoking.

1925: OPINION: "American Mercury" magazine: "A dispassionate review of the [scientific] findings compels the conclusion that the cigarette is tobacco in its mildest form, and that tobacco, used moderately by people in normal health, does not appreciably impair either the mental efficiency or the physical condition." (RK)

1926: BUSINESS: ADVERTISING: P. Lorillard introduces Old Gold cigarettes with expensive campaigns. John Held Flappers, Petty girls, comic-strip style illustrations and "Not a Cough in a Carload" helped the brand capture 7% of the market by 1930.

1926: BUSINESS: ADVERTISING: Liggett & Myers' Chesterfield targets women for second-hand smoke in "Blow some my way" ad. There is a public outcry.

1927: LEGISLATION: Kansas is the last state to drop its ban on cigarette sales.

1927: Eduard Haas, Austrian candy executive invents Pez, rectangular candies sold in tins as an aid for those who wanted to stop smoking and came only in peppermint; the name was derived from the German word for peppermint, Pfefferminz. In 1952, Haas marketed it in the US as a stop-smoking device, but this failed--some say because the dispenser looked like a cigarette lighter. He remarketed it as a candy for children, and the rest is history.

1927: BUSINESS: John Hill founds the agency that would eventually become Hill and Knowlton in Cleveland, Ohio. Instead of working on his own, as was the practice in those days, Hill hired other agents and trained them to work in his "style" - thus becoming, in effect, the founder of the modern-day PR Consultancy.

A sensation is created when George Washington Hill aims Lucky Strike advertising campaign at women for the first time, using testimonials from female movie stars and singers. Soon Lucky Strike has 38% of the American market. Smoking initiation rates among adolescent females triple between 1925-1935.

1927: ADVERTISING: Lorillard: "Old Gold cigarettes ... not a cough in a carload"

1928-30: SAUDI ARABIA: Ikhwan (Brethren) Rebellion. Wahhabi (Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab (1703-87), founded the sect) leader Abdel Aziz Ibn Saud succeeded in uniting many tribes and capturing Saudi cities. He declared himself King in the 1920s. The fierce, ultra-religious wahhabi police (mutawa) would invade peoples' homes and beat the occupants if they smelled tobacco. The Wahhabis' revolt, it is said, was partially aggravated by tobacco issues. As part of a compromise that ended the uprising, King Abdel Aziz agreed to ban tobacco imports (but never did).

1929: HEALTH: Fritz Lickint of Dresden publishes the first formal statistical evidence of a lung cancer-tobacco link, based on a case series showing that lung cancer sufferers were likely to be smokers. Lickint also argued that tobacco use was the best way to explain the fact that lung cancer struck men four or five times more often than women (since women smoked much less). (Proctor)

1929: HEALTH: Statistician Frederick Hoffman in the "American Review of Tuberculosis" finds "There is no definite evidence that smoking habits are a direct contributory cause toward malignant growths in the lungs."(RK).

1929-Spring: ADVERTISING: ATC: Edward Bernays mounts a "freedom march" of smoking debutantes/fashion models who walk down Fifth Avenue during the Easter parade dressed as Statues of Liberty and holding aloft their Lucky Strike cigarettes as "torches of freedom."

1930: BUSINESS: The successors of the Tobacco Trust, led by RJ Reynolds, hike cigarette prices (at the beginning of the Depression), leaving a perfect opening for Philip Morris, Brown & Williamson, and other small manufacturers to counter with low-priced brands..

1930-1931: BUSINESS: Benson & Hedges introduces Parliament, which came in a hard box. It featured a mouthpiece, and the first commercial filter tip: a wad of cotton, soaked in caustic soda. Both were meant mostly to keep bits of tobacco out of the smoker's mouth.

1931-06: BUSINESS: Cigarette Price Wars begin. Cigs sold for 14 cents a pack, 2-for-27 cents in the depths of the depression. Even with cheap leaf prices and manufacturing costs, and with "Luckies" advancing, RJReynolds President S. Clay Williams ups "Camel" prices a penny a pack. Others follow suit. The major TCs are seen as greedy opportunists. Dime-a-pack discount cigs eat into the majors' market share, taking as much as 20% of the market in 1932; PM releases "Paul Jones" discount brand. In 1933, TCs lower prices. Discounts maintain 11% of the market for the rest of the 30s (RK)

1931: Safco is established by A.G. Busch, Safco is credited with engineering the cigarette lighter plug for Ford's first automobiles.

1933: BUSINESS: Philip Morris resuscitates and revitalizes its Philip Morris as a tony, but only premium-priced ("Now only 15 cents") "English Blend" brand.

1933: BUSINESS: RJR begins to sell Camel in a one-piece 10-pack carton, the first time such packaging is used.

1933: BUSINESS: Hill & Knowlton is officially born when John Hill is joined by Don Knowlton.

1933-11-25: ADVERTISING: The Journal of the American Medical Association, "after careful consideration of the extent to which cigarettes were used by physicians in practice," publishes its first advertisement for cigarettes (Chesterfield), a practice that continued for 20 years. (ASG)

1933: ADVERTISING: Chesterfield begins running ads in the New York State Journal of Medicine, with claims like, "Just as pure as the water you drink . . . and practically untouched by human hands."

1933-04-17: ADVERTISING: Bellboy JOHNNY ROVENTINI first goes on the air on the Ferde Grofe Show, his distinctive voice making the famous, "Call for Philip Morris." After being discovered by ad exec Milton Biow, he soon became the world's first living trademark. Against the background music of the "On the Trail Movement'' from Grof's Grand Canyon Suite, Johnny Roventini yelled it out, in perfect B-flat pitch, to match the music. [Here's the Johnny Roventini Fan Page]

1934: LEGISLATION: GARRISON ACT is passed outlawing marijuana and other drugs; tobacco is not considered.

1934: ELEANOR ROOSEVELT is called the "first lady to smoke in public." (ASG)

1934: BUSINESS: An A&P ad lists cigarette prices for Lucky Strikes, Chesterfields, Old Golds and Camels: two packs for 25 cents / a carton of ten for $1.20.

1934: ADVERTISING: RJR: Camel: "Smoke as many as you want. They never get on your nerves"

1935-09: MEDIA: FORTUNE magazine reports on "Alcohol and Tobacco" (two of its chief advertisers), concluding (page 98), "the sum total of our knowledge of the 'evil' of smoking does not add up to much more than a zero."

1936: American Journal of Obstetrics and Bynecology publishes an article raising concerns about the effect of smoking on unborn children

1936: GERMANY: German cigarette manufacturer CIGARETTEN BILDENDIENST offers coupons in cigarette packs which are redeemable for a coffee-table book on Hitler. More coupons bought "home album" pictures suitable for pasting into designated spots. Goebbels oversaw production of the book. (Fahs, Cigarette Confidential)

1937: Federal Government establishes the National Cancer Institute at Bethesda, MD (RK)

1937: BUSINESS: 'Printers Ink' reports that R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., and Ligett & Myers Tobacco Co. each spent at least two million dollars on advertising in the first half of 1937. (LB)

1937: BUSINESS: By the end of the year, Camels are outselling Luckies and Chesterfield by about 40%. (RK)

1938: LEGISLATION: Federal FOOD, DRUG AND COSMETICS ACT supercedes 1906 Act. Definition of a "drug" includes "articles intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease in man or other animals" and "articles (other than food) intended to affect the structure or any function of the body of man or other animals"

1938: LEGISLATION: AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT ACT is passed again, this time authorizing marketing quotas. The Tobacco Price Support Program: Tobacco not purchased by manufacturers at auction is pooled and purchased by the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative for storage and future sale

CR notes that Philip Morris lays "great stress in their advertising upon their substitution of glycol for glycerine. The aura of science surrounding their 'proofs' that this makes a less irritating smoke, does not convince many toxicologists that they were valid. Of the many irritating combustion products in tobacco smoke, the modification of one has probably little more than a psychological ffect in reducing irritation felt by the smoker."

In blindfold tests, finds little to distinguish brands

Knocks "the obvious bias of cigarette manufacturers, as well as of the 'scientists' whom they directly or indirectly subsidize."

1939: GERMANY: Fritz Lickint, in collaboration with the Reich Committee for the Struggle against Adictive Drugs and the German Antitobacco League, publishes Tabak und Organismus (Tobacco and the Organism). Proctor calls the 1,100 page volume "arguably the most comprehensive scholarly indictment of tobacco ever published." It blamed smoking for cancers all along the Rauchstrasse ("smoke alley")--lips, tongue, mouth, jaw, esophagus, windpipe and lungs, and included "a convincing argu ent that 'passive smoking' ( Passivrauchen. . . ) posed a serious threat to nonsmokers." [Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer]

1939: HEALTH: GERMANY: Franz Muller presents "the world's first controlled epidemiological study of the tobacco-lung cancer relationship." --Proctor. Tabakmissbrauch und Lungencarcinom ("Tobacco Misuse and Lung Carcinoma") finds that "the extraordinary rise in tobacco use [is] the single most important cause of the rising incidence of lung cancer." A brief abstarct is published in the Sept. 30, 1939 issue of JAMA Franz Hermann Muller of the University of Cologne's Pathological Institute finds extremely strong dose relationship between smoking and lung cancer. (Mller FH. Tabakmissbrauch und Lungencarcinom. Zeitschrift fr Krebsforschung 1939;49:5785.)

1939: ADVERTISING: "Philip Morris -- a cigarette recognized by eminent medical authorities for its advantages to the nose and throat"

1939: GERMANY: Hermann Goring issues a decree forbidding the military to smoke on the streets, on marches, and on brief off duty periods.

1939-1945: WORLD WAR II

As part of the war effort, Roosevelt makes tobacco a protected crop. General Douglas McArthur makes the corncob pipe his trademark by posing with it on dramatic occasions such as his wading ashore during the invasion and reconquest of the Philippines. Cigarettes are included in GI's C-Rations. Tobacco companies send millions of free cigs to GI's, mostly the popular brands; the home front had to make do with off-brands like Rameses or Pacayunes. Tobacco consumption is so fierce a shortage develops. By the end of the war, cigarette sales are at an all-time high.

1940: JAPAN: WORLD WAR II: English names on cigarette packs are replaced with Japanese ones as part of a nationwide campaign to boost national prestige.

1940s: ENTERTAINMENT: "Raleigh Cigarette Program" airs on radio. Red Skelton's show for a period was broadcast under this name.

1940: GERMANY: 5% of the German tobacco harvest is "nicotine-free tobacco."

1940-1950: MEDIA: George Seldes exposes the suppression of tobacco stories by the nation's press As most tobacco-ad-laden newspapers refused to report the growing evidence of tobacco's hazards, muckraking pioneer George Seldes starts his own newsletter in which he covered tobacco. "For 10 years, we pounded on tobacco as one of the only legal poisons you could buy in America," he told R. Holhut, editor of The George Seldes Reader.

1941: HEALTH: An article by Dr. Michael DeBakey notes a correlation between the increased sale of tobacco and the increasing prevalence of lung cancer

1941: GERMANY: Tobacco taxes account for 1/12th of all revenues flowing into the national treasury. (Proctor).

1941-04-05: GERMANY: The racial hygienist and Professor of Medicine Karl Astel founds the Wissenschaftliches Institut zur Erforschung der Tabakgefahren (Scientific Institute for the Research into the Hazards of Tobacco or Institute for the Struggle Against Tobacco Hazards, as it was also known), at Jena University in Weimar with a 100 000 Reichsmarks grant from Hitler's Reich Chancellery. Shortly after, the industry established its own information organ, the 'Tabacologia medicinalis,' which is soon shut down by Reich Health Fhrer Leonardo Conti. (Proctor).

1941: ADVERTISING: RJR: Camel smoke-ring billboard becomes a Times Square landmark for the next 25 years.

1942: SCIENCE: British researcher L.M. Johnston successfully substituted nicotine injections for smoking Johnston discusses aspects of addiction including tolerance, craving and withdrawal symptoms. He concludes: Clearly the essence of tobacco smoking is the tobacco and not the smoking. Satisfaction can be obtained from chewing it, from snuff taking, and from the administration of nicotine. The experiment is reported in the British medical journal Lancet.

1942: GERMANY: The Federation of German Women launch a campaign against tobacco and alcohol abuse; restaurants and cafes are forbidden to sell cigarettes to women customers.

1942: ADVERTISING: Brown and Williamson claims that Kools would keep the head clear and/or give extra protection against colds.

1942: BUSINESS: "Lucky Strike Green Has Gone to War." Lucky Strike's green/gold pack turns all-white, with a red bull's eye. The war effort needed titanium, contained in Lucky's green ink, and bronze, contained in the gold. ATC took this opportunity to change the color of the pack--hated by women because it clashed with their dresses--to white. Ad campaign coincides with US invasion of North Africa. Sales increase 38%.

1942-07: Reader's Digest publishes "Cigarette Advertising Fact and Fiction," claiming that cigarettes were essentially all the same, and were deadly.

1942-12-14: THE PRESS The first complete,documented, and authoritative story on tobacco as a cause of diseases and a shortener of life appeared in the Dec 14 1942 issue of George Seldes' IN Fact. --IN Fact, Nov. 14, 1949

1943: ADVERTISING: Philip Morris places an ad in the National Medical Journal which reads: "'Don't smoke' is advice hard for patients to swallow. May we suggest instead 'Smoking Philip Morris?' Tests showed three out of every four cases of smokers' cough cleared on changing to Philip Morris. Why not observe the results for yourself?"

1943: BUSINESS: THAILAND: Cigarette production is made a state monopoly under the Thailand Tobacco Monopoly.

1943-07: GERMANY: LEGISLATION: a law is passed forbidding tobacco use in public places by anyone under 18 years of age.

1944-07-15: MEDIA: JAMA publishes as its main item "The Effects of Smoking Cigarets." George Seldes claimed mainstream news coverage of the article was generally suppressed.

1945: REGULATION: The three largest tobacco companies are convicted of anti-trust violations.

1945-04: MEDIA: College of Physicians & Surgeons publishes "The Effect of Smoking Tobacco on the Cardiovascular System," written by Dr Roth of the Mayo Clinic.

1945-04: GERMANY: Karl Astel, founder of the Scientific Institute for Research into the Dangers of Tobacco, committs suicide, presumably to avoid facing the consequences of his activities as a leading racial hygienist in the Third Reich. The Institute is soon disbanded.

"According to a recent nationwide survey: MORE DOCTORS SMOKE CAMELS THAN ANY OTHER CIGARETTE! Family physicians, surgeons, diagnosticians, nose and throat specialists, doctors in every branch of medicine... a total of 113,597 doctors...were asked the question: "What cigarette do you smoke?" And more of them named Camel as their smoke than any other cigarette! Three independent research groups found this to be a fact. You see, doctors too smoke for pleasure. That full Camel flavor is just as appealing to a doctor's taste as to yours...that marvelous Camel mildness means just as much to his throat as to yours. Next time, get Camels. Compare them in your "T-Zone" 30-day test

1946-12-02: MEDIA: Newsweek runs a story by Dr Wm D Stroud, professor of cardiology at the UPenn Graduate School of Medicine, "Smoke, Drink, and Get Well."

1946: A letter from a Lorillard chemist to its manufacturing committee states: "Certain scientists and medical authorities have claimed for many years that the use of tobacco contributes to cancer development in susceptible people. Just enough evidence has been presented to justify the possibility of such a presumption." (Maryland "Medicaid" Lawsuit 5/1/96)

1947-05-18: MEDIA: NY Times Sunday magazine carries a glowIng tribute to tobacco by staff writer W B Hayward, "Why We Smoke -- We Like It." The sidebar, purporting to show an opposing side, contains no mention of recent studies indicating links to heart disease, cancer and decreased longevity.

1947: CULTURE: "Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)," Written by Merle Travis for Tex Williams, is national hit. The lyric "Puff, Puff, Puff, And if you smoke yourself to death" is later used in Cipollone case as defense that Rose Cipollone knew cigarettes were dangerous.

1948: HEALTH: The Journal of the American Medical Association argues, "more can be said in behalf of smoking as a form of escape from tension than against it . . . there does not seem to be any preponderance of evidence that would indicate the abolition of the use of tobacco as a substance contrary to the public health."

1948: HEALTH: Lung cancer has grown 5 times faster than other cancers since 1938; behind stomach cancer, it is now the most common form of the disease.

In the same issue, "Tobacco Smoking as a Possible Etiologic Factor in Bronchiogenic Carcinoma: A Study of 684 Proved Cases," by Ernst L. Wynder and Evarts A. Graham of the United States, found that 96.5% of lung cancer patients interviewed were moderate heavy-to-chain-smokers.

1950-09:30: RICHARD DOLL and A BRADFORD HILL publish first report on Smoking and Carcinoma of the Lung in the British Medical Journal, finding that heavy smokers were fifty times as likely as nonsmokers to contract lung cancer.

1950: LITIGATION: P. Lorillard Co. v. FTC. Lorillard had launched a national campaign claiming a 1942 Consumer Reports article showed Old Golds was "lowest in nicotine and tars". While technically true, the point of the article was that differences in tar and nicotine were insignificant when it came to the harmfulness of all cigarettes. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, upholding the FTC's cease-and-desist order, declares that Lorillard's advertising violated the FTC Act because, by printing only a small part of the article, it created an entirely false and misleading impression. "To tell less than the whole truth is a well-known method of deception," the court ruled. (CC) Along with other protracted- FTC censures against tobacco company ad claims of the 30s and 40s, the action was too little too late. The Consumers Union Report on Smoking and the Public Interest (1963) said, "Like astronomers studying stars millions of light years away, the FTC commissioners were constantly coming to conclusions about phenomena that were no longer in existence."

1951: Consumers in many countries now spend from 3 to 5 per cent of their total income on tobacco products, American delegate John B. Hutson tells the World Tobacco Congress. Mr. Hutson, president of Tobacco Associates, Inc., of Washington, D.C., said in a "General Economic Survey" that "the average per capita consumption for all countries has increased slightly during the past 20 years."

1951-10-15: MEDIA: TV series "I Love Lucy" begins its run at 9:00 PM. It is sponsored by Philip Morris. The animated titles that open the show each week feature stick figures of Lucy and Desi climbing a giant pack of Philip Morris cigarettes. It is the top-rated show for four of its first six full seasons.

1952: BUSINESS: P. Lorillard introduces Kent cigarettes, with the "Micronite" filter. At the press conference at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Lorillard boasted that the "Micronite" filter offered "the greatest health protection in cigarette history." Its secret: asbestos.

1952: ADVERTISING: Lorillard: "Kent and only Kent has the Micronite filter, made of a pure, dust-free, completely harmless material that is not only effective but so safe that it actually is used to help filter the air in operating rooms of leading hospitals." (Life Magazine)

1952: ADVERTISING: Liggett & Myers widely publicizes the results of tests run by Arthur D. Little, Inc. showing that "smoking Chesterfields would have no adverse effects on the throat, sinuses or affected organs." The ads run, among other places on the nationally popular Arthur Godfiey radio and television show.

1952-09: READER'S DIGEST republishes Roy Norr's "Cancer by the Carton" article (December, 1952) from the October, 1952 Christian Herald. Norr was the publisher of possibly the first modern anti-smoking periodical, the "Norr Newsletter about Smoking and Health" (NYC)

1953: HEALTH: Dr. Ernst L. Wynder's landmark report finds that painting cigarette tar on the backs of mice creates tumors. This was the first successful induction of cancer in a lab animal with a tobacco product, the first definitive biological link between smoking and cancer.

1953: BUSINESS: Benson & Hedges' Parliament sales are skyrocketing due to its filter, though sales are still well behind the major companies' products: B&W's Viceroy, and Lorillard's Kent.

1953-12-08: HEALTH: Dr. Alton Ochsner gives a speech in NYC, saying, "the male population of the United States would be decimated if cigarette smoking increases as it has in the past unless some steps are taken to remove the cancer-producing factor from cigarettes." Tobacco stocks drop 1 to 4 points the next day. This speech is considered by some the last straw, which led tobacco executives join together and to seek out John Hill.

1953-12-10,11: BUSINESS: In response to an urgent telegram from Paul Hahn (ATC), cigarette executives meet in New York City for first time since price-fixing scandal of 1939, and agree to consult with John Hill.

1954: Don Cooley, in the process of writing an article for True Magazine, is contacted by Hill and Knowlton. "Considerable information and assistance was provided Donald G. Cooley in the preparation for his story in True Magazine. This entailed conferences with the author to work on factual revisions. . . Further research and assembling of material and personal conferences have been extended Mr. Cooley to provide him requested aid in his writing of a 48-page, low-priced book for newsstand sales and angled at the idea "You don't have to give up smoking." Fawcett Publications is issuing the book entitled 'Smoke Without Fear' , in late August and early September. " Report of Activities through July 31, 1954

1954: ADVERTISING: Life Magazine runs ads for L&M featuring Barbara Stanwyck and Rosalind Russell giving testimonials for the brand's new "miracle product," the "alpha cellulose" filter that is "just what the doctor ordered." These ads will figure prominently in the Cipollone trial 30 years later.

1954: ADVERTISING: Marlboro Cowboy created for Philip Morris by Chicago ad agency Leo Burnett. "Delivers the Goods on Flavor" ran the slogan in newspaper ads. Design of the campaign credited to John Landry of PM. At the time Marlboro had one quarter of 1% of the American market.

1954-02: UK: Health Minister Iain Macleod, finally meets the press in regards to the Doll/Hill studies. He emphasises that the evidence is statistical only, thanks Doll and Hill for what little
information we have¹ - and chain-smokes throughout the proceedings. He also announced that the tobacco industry had given £250,000 for research to the MRC. The press reported the uncertainty and the industry¹s generosity. ("40 Years Later," RCP)

1954-03-10: LITIGATION: St. Louis factory worker Ira C. Lowe files a suit, the first product liability action brought against a tobacco company. PHILIP MORRIS hired DAVID R. HARDY to defend the company against a lawsuit brought by a Missouri smoker who had lost his larynx to cancer. This case was the beginning of PM's association with SHOOK, HARDY & BACON. The case was won in 1962; the jury deliberated one hour

1954-03-24: BUSINESS: RJR's first filter, Winston, is launched.

1954-04: BUSINESS: TIRC releases A SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE ON THE CIGARETTE CONTROVERSY, a booklet quoting 36 scientists questioning smoking's link to health problems.
(The booklet) was sent to 176,800 doctors, general practitioners and specialists . . . (plus) deans of medical and dental colleges . . . a press distribution of 15,000 . . . 114 key publishers and media heads . . . . days in advance, key press, network, wire services and columnist contacts were alerted by phone and in person . . . and . . . hand-delivered (with) special placement to media in Los Angeles, Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C. The story was carried by hundreds of papers and radio stations throughout the country . . . . staff-written stories (were) developed with the help of Hill & Knowlton, Inc. field offices. (Hill & Knowlton memo, May 3, 1954.)

1954-07-26: PROPAGANDA: NCI Dr. W.C. Hueper's talk, "Environmental Cancer of the Lung," is given at the VIth International Cancer Congress in Sao Paolo, Brazil. Hill & Knowlton, having received an advance copy of Dr. W.C. Hueper's talk, and finding it favorable to their cigarette clients, deploy the 17 page text, with 2 pages of highlights and a cover letter, to newspapers and services, science writers, editorial writers and feature writers.

[A]s a result of the distribution in the U.S.A., stories questioning a link between smoking and cancer were given wide attention, both in headlines and stories. In some press accounts, the Hueper story took precedence over the reports of Drs. Hammond and Wynder.

[Note: Wilhelm Hueper had been through years of battling corporate interests over water, air and occupational pollution; while recognizing the evidence for smoking-related causation, he felt these issues could be slighted by an over-emphasis on smoking. He reportedly refused a $250,000 a year offer from the Tobacco Institute.]

1954-10: PROPAGANDA: Reprints of condensed version of Hueper paper appear in CURRENT MEDICAL DIGEST, October 1954. The magazine reaches 123,000 doctors who are in active practice.

1955: INDUSTRY RESEARCH: Independent of its Research Department, ATC President Robert Karl Heimann participated in the last two parts of a five-party epidemiological study of American Tobacco Co.'s own employees. The five parts were described as follows:

1. Dorn and Baum (NIH) studied the mortality rates during the period 1946 to 1952 of 11,000 employees. This was published in 1955 in the Journal of Industrial Medicine and Surgery.

2. A. Finkner (UNC) studied the smoking habits of these same employees, and published his results in the "North Carolina Mimeo Series' in the late 1950s.

3. Haag (MCV) and Hanmer (American) updated the Dorn-Baum, study of mortality rates for the period 1953 to 1956. This was published in about 1958 in the Journal of industrial Medicine and Surgery.

4. Cohen (American consultant) and Heimann updated the mortality rates for the period 19571960. The study was entitled 'Heavy Smokers with Low Mortality" and was published in 1963 in the Journal of Industrial Medicine and Surgery.'

5. Cohen and Heimann published 'Heavy Smokers with Low Mortality and the Urban Factor in Lung Cancer Mortality" in 1964.14"

1955: BUSINESS: MARKET SHARE: American Tobacco is still #1 in US, with 33% of the market. Philip Morris is sixth.

1955: TV: CBS' "See It Now" airs first TV show linking cigarette smoking with lung cancer and other diseases. (For the first time on TV, Edward R. Murrow is not seen smoking. He had not quit; he felt it was "too late" to stop. Murrow died of lung cancer in 1965.)

1955-09: REGULATION: FTC publishes rules prohibiting health references in cigarette advertising; references to the "throat, larynx, lungs, nose, or other parts of the body" or to "digestion, energy, nerves, or doctors."

1957: PEOPLE: DR. EVARTS GRAHAM dies of lung cancer. He wrote to DR. ALTON OCHSNER 2 weeks before his death, "Because of your long friendship, you will be interested in knowing that they found that I have cancer in both my lungs. As you know I stopped smoking several years ago but after having smoked much as I did for years, too much damage had been done."

1957-07-12: Surgeon General Leroy E. Burney issues "Joint Report of Study Group on Smoking and Health," stating that, "prolonged cigarette smoking was a causative factor in the etiology of lung cancer," the first time the Public Health Service had taken a position on the subject.

1957-03: MEDIA: READERS DIGEST article links smoking with lung cancer, discloses that the tar and nicotine yields of the filter brands had been rising steadily for several years and now approximated the level of the older and presumably more hazardous unfiltered brands. (RK)

1957-07: MEDIA: READERS DIGEST article rates tar/nicotine levels. RJR's filterless Camel, for example, yielded 31 mg. of tar and 2.8 mg. of nicotine per cigarette compared with 32.6 mg. and 2.6 mg. per Winston. Marlboro has one of the worst; in response, Leo Burnett goes into 2 years of the unsuccessful "settleback" campaign--Marlboro men in relaxed poses.

Barry McCarthy, onetime executive at Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, said that in the 1950's, probably 1957, he was the account supervisor on the Reader's Digest business when the Digest ran one of its many anti-cigarette articles. American Tobacco, maker of Lucky Strike, was a major client at the same time. The article enraged J. T. Ross, American's public relations man, and he got the client to insist that B.B.D.O. decide between the magazine and the tobacco company. Since the latter billed $30 million or so, which was huge by 1950's standards, and the Digest a couple of million, the agency relucantly dropped the Digest

--NYT, April 7, 1988; Advertising; RJR Flap Not the First In Cigarette Ad History By Philip H. Dougherty

1957: REGULATION: Pope Pius Xii suggests that the Jesuit order give up smoking.

There were only 33,000 jesuits in the world at that point, so the industry was not worried about losing this handful of smokers. They feared that the Pope or other church leaders might ask, as a magazine headline once put it, "When are Cigs a Sin?"

--E. Whelan, "A Smoking Gun"

1957: REGULATION: Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act is amended. The manufacturer must bear the burden of demonstrating the product is safe and effective. Products previously on the market, those "generally recognized among experts as safe," or "natural constituents of food" are exempt.

1957-03-01: INDUSTRY RESEARCH: At the cooperative British tobacco industry Tobacco Research Council laboratory at Harrogate, an internal report by Batco refers to cancer by the code name, zephyr: "As a result of several statistical surveys, the idea has arisen that there is a causal relation between zephyr and tobacco smoking, particularly cigarette smoking,"

1957: HEALTH: The British Medical Research Council issues "Tobacco Smoking and Cancer of Lung," which states that "... a major part of the increase [in lung cancer] is associated with tobacco smoking, particularly in the form of cigarettes" and that "the relationship is one of direct cause and effect."

1957: HEALTH: PREGNANCY: In the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Dr. Winea J. Simpson asked what effects smoking might have on the unborn child. The incidence of premature births and of all the complications that go with prematurity was twice as great for smoking mothers as it was for nonsmoking mothers. Simpson's paper confirmed that children of smokers are not only born early, but also weigh less and are more likely to be stillborn or die within one month of birth. (ASG)

1957-07: REGULATION: Sen. Bennett (R-UT) introduces bill requiring cigarette packs carry label, "Warning: Prolonged use of this product may result in cancer, in lung, heart and circulatory ailments, and in other diseases." [Bates 03553092]

1957-07: REGULATION: BLATNICK HEARING: First testimony presented to Congress on smoking and health; Blatnick's subcommittee dismantled. After hearing that filtered cigarettes deliver about as much tar and nicotine as unfiltered due to the stronger tobaccos used, Minnesota congressman John Blatnick's subcommitte moves to grant the FTC injunctive powers over deceptive cigarette advertising. The House strips Blatnick of his chairmanship and dissolves the subcommittee.

1957-12: LITIGATION: Green v. American Tobacco Co. Filed. The case will not conclude until 1970--12 years after Green's death.

1958 (approx): Haag (MCV) and Hanmer (American) update of the Dorn-Baum study of American Tobacco Co. employee mortality rates for the period 1953 to 1956 is published in the Journal of industrial Medicine and Surgery.

1958: Roy Norr and the Reverend Ben-David found The Reporter On Smoking And Health newsletter

1958: BUSINESS: Tobacco Institute Formed

1958: DOCUMENTS: Senior PM scientist J.E. Lincoln writes to Ross Millhiser, then-Philip Morris vice president and later vice chairman: "This compound [benzopyrene] must be removed from Marlboro and Parliament or sharply reduced. We do this not because we think it is harmful but simply because those who are in a better position to know than ourselves suspect it may be harmful." Four months later he wrote "that law and morality coincided . . . Act on the doctrine of uncertainty and get the benzpyrene (sic), etc., out of the cigarettes." Lincoln later became PM vice president of research. (AP)

1958-02-20: REGULATION: Blatnik Commission report is delivered to Congress. "The cigarette manufacturers have deceived the American public through their advertising of filter-tip cigarettes . . . Without specifically claiming that the filter tip removes the agents alleged to contribute to heart disease or lung cancer, the advertising has emphasized such claims as 'clean smoking,' 'snowy white,' 'pure,' 'miracle tip,' '20,000 filter traps,' 'gives you more of what you changed to a filter for' and other phrases implying health protection, when actually most filter cigarettes produce as much or more nicotine and tar as cigarettes without filters. . . The Federal Trade Commission has failed in its statutory duty to 'prevent deceptive acts or practices' in filter-cigarette advertising."
False And Misleading Advertising (Filter-tip Cigarettes). Twentieth Report By The Committee On Government OperationsVery shortly afterwards, Blatnik's commission was unceremoniously dissolved.

1958-06: DOCUMENTS: "REPORT ON VISIT TO U.S.A. AND CANADA," 17th of April to 12th May 1958," by H. R. Bentley, D. G. I. Felton, and W. W. Reid, produced by B.A.T. Company, Ltd. 3 British-American Tobacco Co. scientists, after visiting the United States and discussing smoking research with 35 tobacco industry scientists and officials, write: "With one exception (H.S.N. Greene), the individuals whom we met believed that smoking causes lung cancer if by 'causation' we mean any chain of events which leads finally to lung cancer and which involves smoking as an indispensable link. In the U.S.A. only Berkson, apparently, is now prepared to doubt the statistical evidence and his reasoning is nowhere thought to be sound."

1959-11: HEALTH: Dr Burney publishes an article in JAMA confirming the position of the Public Health Service on cigarettes' causitive relation to lung cancer.

1959-Fall: The "Vanguard Issue." Vanguard was a tobaccoless smoke introduced in the Fall of 1959. The product's creator, Bantop Products Corporation of Bay Shore, Long Island, immediately ran into problems advertising it. Bantop claimed the tobacco industry conspired to prevent its "Now Smoke Without Fear" ads. In the New York metropolitan area, for example, only one newspaper would accept the ads. (ASG)

1959: Industry pressures the New York City Transit Authority to order Reader's Digest to remove from the subways ads promoting an article titled "The Growing Horror of Lung Cancer."

The SixtiesBy now, the distribution of free cigarettes at annual medical and public health meetings has stopped.

1960: LEGISLATION: FEDERAL HAZARDOUS SUBSTANCES LABELING ACT (FHSA) of 1960 Authorized FDA to regulate substances that are hazardous (either toxic, corrosive, irritant, strong sensitizers, flammable, or pressure-generating). Such substances may cause substantial personal injury or illness during or as a result of customary use.

1960-04-04: LITIGATION: Pritchard v. Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company begins. When it was time to deliberate, Federal Judge John L. Miller tells the jury, "The court is of the opinion that no substantial evidence has been offered to support a verdict against the defendant on any theory of negligence, and that fair-minded men could not differ as to the conclusions of fact to be drawn from the evidence... The jury is directed to find a verdict in favor of the defendant Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company, and against the plaintiff, Otto E. Pritchard." The case was sent back to Miller on appeal. The jury found on November 9, 1962 that the smoking of Chesterfields was the cause of or one of the causes of cancer in Pritchard's right lung, but denied damages to Pritchard on the assumption of risk theory.

1960: Bernays Repents. ASH praises Bernays for his efforts to inform the public about the dangers of smoking. Bernays writes, "had I known in 1928 what I know today I would have refused [George Washington] Hill's offer."

1960:08:02: LITIGATION: Green v. American Tobacco Co. Decision. Lawyer/Doctor Larry Hastings is first to win a liability suit against tobacco for causing death. Miami Federal District Judge Emett Choate asked the jury to consider (1) Was cancer primary in the lung? (2) Did this cause his death? (3) Did the smoking of Lucky Strikes cause his cancer death? In all three instances, the 12-man jury voted "yes." The fourth interrogatory asked, "Did the cigarette company have knowledge of the harmfulness?" The jury said, "no." Therefore, no money was awarded. In retrial, judge tells jury to side with defendant if the product did not endanger an important number of smokers. Jury does.

1960-10: LITIGATION: Tobacco wins Lartigue v. L&M/RJR.

1961: HISTORY: The Tobacco Institute stages a celebration of the 350th anniversary of America's first tobacco crop. The festival features Pocahontas and a cigar-smoking John Rolfe.

1961-06-01: POLITICS: The presidents of the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, the National Tuberculosis Association, and the American Public Health Association submit a joint letter to President Kennedy, pointing out the increasing evidence of the health hazards of smoking and urging the President to establish a commission.

1962-03-07: UK: First Report of the British Royal College of Physicians of London: Smoking and Health,.

1962: STATISTICS: Per-capita consumption of cigarettes stands at 12 per day among adult Americans

1962: LEGISLATION: KEFAUVER-HARRIS DRUG AMENDMENTS TO THE FOOD, DRUG AND COSMETICS ACT requires that drugs must be proven effective and safe before sold and manufacturers are to registered with the FDA.

1962: Bob Newhart Satirizes Sir Walter Raleigh. "The Bob Newhart Show" played on NBC- briefly. In one episode, Newhart played an Englishman getting a phone call from Sir Walter Raleigh in the Americas. The Sir Walter Raleigh bit is preserved on a record album. Said H. Allen Smith, "That thing about tobacco and cigarettes is possibly the greatest single comedy routine I've seen or heard in my entire life."

Don't tell me, Walt, don't tell me- you stick in your ear, right Walt? Oh, between your lips! Then what do you do to it? (Giggling) You set fire to it! Then what do you do, Walt? You inhale the smoke! . . . Walt, we've been a little worried about you...you're gonna have a tough time getting people to stick burning leaves in their mouth...."

1962:06: Surgeon General Luther Terry announces the formation of the Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health.

1962:06: LEGISLATION: Sen. Moss (D-UT) introduces a measure to give the FDA the power to police content, advertising and labeling of cigarettes.

1962-07: LITIGATION: Tobacco wins Ross v. PM

1962-11: LITIGATION: Tobacco wins Pritchard v. L&M (and agin in 1968)

1963: LEGISLATION: FDA expressed its interpretation that tobacco did not fit the "hazardous" criteria stated of the Federal Hazardous Substances Labeling Act (FHSA) of 1960, and withheld recommendations pending the release of the report of the Surgeon General's Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health.

1964: BUSINESS: TIRC changes its name to the Council for Tobacco Research-USA, Inc. ("CTR").

1964: BUSINESS: MARLBORO Country ad campaign is launched. "Come to where the flavor is. Come to Marlboro Country." Marlboro sales begin growing at 10% a year.

1964: JAPAN: Emperor Hirohito begins the tradition of giving out cigarettes to his staff on his birthday.

1964-02-07: The AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSN accepts a $10 million grant for tobacco research from six cigarette companies. The AMA shelves its previous plans to issue a report on smoking's relationship to cancer; the official AMA word on smoking and health won't be issued for another 10 years.

1964-02-28: The AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSN supports the tobacco industry's objection to labeling cigarets as a health hazard, writes in a letter to the Federal Trade Commission, "More than 90 million persons in the United States use tobacco in some form, and, of these 72 million use cigarets... the economic lives of tobacco growers, processors, and merchants are entwined in the industry; and local, state, and the federal governments are recipients of and dependent upon many millions of dollars of tax revenue."

1964-03-19: Rep. FRANK THOMPSON Jr. (D-NJ) charges that the AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSN has entered into a deal with tobacco-state congressmen to gain their votes against Medicare.

1964-09-10 to 10-15: BUSINESS: Sir PHILIP ROGERS and GEOFFREY TODD, senior officials of the BRITISH RESEARCH COUNCIL arrive in US on month-long fact-finding tour. Their reports will not be seen by the public until 10/2/96.

1965: CONSUMPTION: 29.6 percent of people who had ever smoked had quit as of 1965.

1965: BUSINESS: The tobacco industry's Cigarette Advertising Code, announced in the Spring of 1964 to minimize the FTC's ad restrictions, takes effect. Drawn up by the Policy Committee of Lawyers, its administrator is respected ex-NJ-governor Robert B. Meyner, who was given authority to fine violators up to $100,000. The code banned advertising and marketing directed mainly at those under 21 years old, and ended advertising and promotion in school and college publications. No violations or fines were ever levied

In 1983, the Tobacco Institute published a pamphlet entitled "Voluntary Initiatives of a Responsible Industry." The pamphlet noted that "in 1964, the industry adopted a cigarette advertising code prohibiting advertising, marketing and sampling directed at young people."-- DOJ Complaint, 9/22/99

1965-08-01: UK: Government bans cigarette advertisements on TV

1965: BUSINESS: MARKET SHARE: American's share of the market sank from 35% in 1965 to 17.8% in 1971. By 1978 they were down to 12%.

("Relationship of cigarette smoking to the clinical course and behavior of cancers of the lung, larynx and rectum, with particular reference to the development of techniques of multivariable analysis.)
"The Ad Hoc Committee divided the proposals referred to into three categories:
Category A: Projects essentially of "adversary" value. These are considered to have a relatively high priority.
Category B: Research having a generally defensive character.
Category C. Basic research." " Bates #: 2017025366/5370 ( http://www.pmdocs.com/getallimg.asp?DOCID=2017025366/5370)

1966: PROPAGANDA: "It Is Safe To Smoke" by Lloyd Mallan. "The scientific facts in the smoking vs. health controversy--and a startling, straight-forward conclusion." Mallan visits scientist after scientist, all of whom tell him smoking's not really dangerous, but just in case it is--the charcoal filter (then used on Lark cigarettes) would the best protection. The dedication reads: This book is for Rose Tinker Mallan, my lovely non-smoking wife, who worries with renewed emphasis every time she reads another scare headline in the newspapers "linking" cigarette smoking with disease, and for my son Lloyd Jeffrey, who fiendishly smokes the wrong kind of cigarette.

1967-10: INDUSTRY RESEARCH: "Tobacco Abstracts," a trade publication which offers relevant citations and abstracts to world literature on nicotiana drops the section titled "Health". The announcement was as follows: "(NOTE: Health section will be omitted from now on.)" No further information was offered. (LB)

1967: PROPAGANDA: "It Is Safe To Smoke" by Lloyd Mallan is taken off the market by Hawthorne publishing after the initiation of a congressional investigation into allegations the book was financed by the tobacco industry.

1968: 3rd Surgeon General's Report: The Health Consequences of Smoking: 1968 Supplement to the 1967 Public Health Service Review

1968. MOTOR SPORTS: Colin Chapman's Team Lotus becomes the first Formula One team to accept tobacco sponsorship.

1968-02: PAKISTAN: Pakistan Tobacco Board was established through an ordinance (Pakistan Tobacco Board Ordinance No: 1 of 1968),
to promote the cultivation of tobacco, manufacture and export of tobacco and tobacco products .

1968-01: PROPAGANDA: "To Smoke or Not to Smoke--That Is Still the Question," by Stanley Frank, a widely read sports writer, appears in True Magazine. To call the public's attention to the article, the Industry ran a contemporaneous ad in 72 markets, announcing the article's publication. On March 3,, a similar but shorter article appeared in the National Enquirer entitled "Cigarette Cancer Link is Bunk / 70,000,000 Smokers Falsely Alarmed." written by "Charles Golden" (a fictitious name commonly used by the Enquirer.) The real author was Stanley Frank. Two million reprints of the True Magazine article were distributed to physicians, scientists, journalists, government officials, and other opinion leaders with a small card which stated, "As a leader in your profession and community, you will be interested in reading this story from the January issue of True Magazine about one of today's controversial issues. -- THE EDITORS" The actual sender was the TI, through Tiderock.. It was subsequently disclosed through investigations by Wall St. Journal reporter Ronald Kessler and the FTC that author Frank had been paid $500 to write the article, by Joseph Field, a public relations professional working for Brown and Williamson. [Frank also received $2,000 for the article from True.] Brown and Williamson reimbursed Field for that amount. By the time the True article was published, Frank was an employee of Hill and Knowlton.

1969: SUPREME COURT: U.S. Supreme Court applies the Fairness Doctrine to cigarettes, giving tobacco control groups "equal time" on the air to reply to tobacco commercials

1969: LEGISLATION: Congress enacts the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act of 1969, which amends the 1965 Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act to require the following warning: "The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking is Dangerous to Your Health." The 1969 act also includes the phrase: "(b) No requirement or prohibition based on smoking and health shall be imposed under State law with respect to the advertising or promotion of any cigarettes the packages of which are labeled in conformity with the provisions of this Act."

1969: BANS: Ralph Nader asks the FAA to ban smoking on airlines as annoying and unhealthy for nonsmokers, and as a fire danger; Pan American Airlines creates the first nonsmoking section.

1969: REGULATION: FCC issues a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to ban cigarette ads on TV and radio. Discussions, both in Congress and in private between legislators and tobacco companies, result in cigarette advertisers agreeing to stop advertising on the air in return for a delay in controls on the sale of cigarettes.

1969: BUSINESS: Philip Morris gains a controlling interest (53%) in the Miller Brewing Company (nee 1855), then only the 7th largest brewery.

1969. BUSINESS: American Tobacco drops "tobacco" from parent; American Brands, Inc. established with headquarters in Old Greenwich, CT, as parent company of American Tobacco Co.

1969. BUSINESS: RJ Reynolds Tobacco drops "tobacco."

1969. MOTOR SPORTS: WINSTON CUP racing is born when NASCAR driver Junion Johnson suggests to RJR they sponsor not just a car, but the whole show.

1969: DOCUMENTS: A Philip Morris memo from researcher William Dunn to Dr. Helmut Wakeham, Philip Morris' director of research and development, warned against referring to tobacco as a drug. Dunn wrote, "I would be more cautious . . . do we really want to tout cigarette smoke as a drug? It is, of course, but there are dangerous FDA implications to having such conceptualization go beyond these walls."

1970-02-18: Great American Smokeout is born on "Smokeout Day." Massacusetts smoker and guidance counselor Arthur P. Mullaney and some Randolph High School kids come up with the idea of setting aside one day when everyone in town would quit smoking and donate to a scholarship fund what they would have spent that day on cigarettes. The challenge soon caught on, and in 1977, the American Cancer Society sponsored the first nationwide called "The Great American Smokeout."

1970-03: INDUSTRY RESEARCH: "The Mouse House Massacre" A major research project on smoking and emphysema is dismantled. Former scientist Joseph E. Bumgarner told in a deposition how he and 25 other members of Reynolds' biological research division in Winston-Salem, N.C., were abruptly ordered to surrender their notebooks to the company's legal department and then were fired. .

1970-03-31: LEGISLATION: President Nixon signs a measure banning cigarette advertising on radio and television, to take effect after Jan. 1, 1971

1970-04: LITIGATION: Tobacco wins Weaver v. AT

1970-04-01: LEGISLATION: Stronger mandatory cigarette label is required. Label is changed to read, "Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health."

1970-07-01: TWA becomes first airline to offer no- smoking sections aboard every aircraft in its fleet.

1971: UK: Cigarette Smoking and Health--Report by an Interdepartmental Group of Officials finds that, all things considered, tobacco use brings in more money than it costs in health and disability. Report is unknown to the public until the Guardian publishes an account on May 6, 1980.

1971-01-03: Joseph Cullman, then Chairman of the Board of Philip Morris, Inc., is interviewed on CBS' Face the Nation. The interviewers asked Cullman if he was aware of a massive study [which] showed that babies of smoking mothers were had a greater incidence of low birth weight than non-smoking mothers, that smoking mothers had an increased risk of stillbirth and infant death within 28 days of birth. Cullman said he was aware of the study and its results. He said, "Some women would prefer having smaller babies." Another exchange:, "Well, I think, Mr. Ubell, in this case your premise is wrong. I merely have to refer to the Surgeon General's Advisory Committee report; that report stated categorically that cigarettes are not addictive.
UBELL: I didn't say that they were addictive. I said that nicotine is a drug, within the meaning of a term of drug, meaning a chemical --
MR. CULLMAN: It's more important for the industry to take the word of the Surgeon General's committee; they said that cigarettes are not addictive. . . the Surgeon General's committee largely exonerated nicotine as a health hazard of any consequence to the public. I have to lean on that. After all, the Surgeon General's committee met for nine months or longer, and they concluded that nicotine is not a hazard to health.>

1971-04: Cigarette manufacturers agree to put health warnings on advertisements. This agreement is later made into law.

1971-12-23: Nixon Administration declares "War on Cancer"

1972: 6TH Surgeon General's Report: The Health Consequences of Smoking: A Report of the Surgeon General

Surgeon General's Report addresses "public exposure to air pollution from tobacco smoke" and danger of smoking to the unborn child.

1972: PROPAGANDA: "In 1967, five persons in the U.S. officially died of bunions. One died of headache. One died of emotional instability!" -- Tobacco Institute Backgrounder, 5th in a series of "background papers on the smoking and health controversy." Bates # TIMN 0078551 http://my.tobaccodocuments.org/tdo/view.cfm?CitID=13981

1972-05: BUSINESS: Tobacco Institute memorandum from Fred Panzer (VP) to TI President Horace R. Kornegay, Panzer describes the industry's strategy for defending itself in litigation, politics, and public opinion as "brilliantly conceived and executed over the years" in order to "cast doubt about the health charge" by using "variations on the theme that, `the case is not proved.'" The memorandum urges more intensive lobbying, and advocates public relations efforts to provide tobacco industry sympathizers with evidence "that smoking may not be the causal factor [in disease]." Until now, the industry has supplied symmpathizers with "too little in the way of ready-made credible alternatives."

1972: DOCUMENTS: RJR research scientist Claude Teague writes in a memo, "the tobacco industry may be thought of as being a specialized, highly ritualized and stylized segment of the pharmaceutical industry." Significantly, he added that,"Tobacco products, uniquely, contain and deliver nicotine, a potent drug with a variety of physiological effects. . . Happily for the tobacco industry, nicotine is both habituating and unique in its variety of physiological actions, hence no other active material or combination of materials provides equivalent 'satisfaction..'"

1972-05-24: DOCUMENTS: PM scientist Al Udow writes memo stating that rival brand Kool had the highest nicotine "delivery" of any king-size on the market. "This ties in with the information we have from focus group sessions and other sources that suggest that Kool is considered to be good for 'after marijuana' to maintain the 'high' or for mixing with marijuana, or 'instead." He wrote that Kool's high nicotine is a reason for its success, and that "we should pursue this thought in developing a menthol entry. . . The lessened taste resulting from the lowered tar can be masked by high menthol or other flavors. Many menthol smokers say they are not looking for high tobacco taste anyway. . . A widely held theory holds that most people smoke for the narcotic effect (relaxing, sedative) that comes from the nicotine. The 'taste comes from the 'tar' (particulate matter) delivery. . . . Although more people talk about 'taste,' it is likely that greater numbers smoke for the narcotic value that comes from the nicotine."

1972-09: INDUSTRY RESEARCH: Boston, MA: Gary Huber's "Tobacco and Health Research Program, aka "The Harvard Project" begins, the result of a $2.8 million grant to Harvard, the largest ever for a University. It will run until 1980, generating 239 medical publications, including 27 books and 54 peer-reviewed scientific papers ("Civil Warriors," pp. 288-89)

1973: 7TH Surgeon General's Report: The Health Consequences of Smoking 1973 Finds cigar and pipe smokers' health risks to be less than cigarette smokers, but more than nonsmokers.

1973: SCIENCE: RJR report on success of PM's Marlboro and B&W's Kool brands states, "A cigarette is a system for delivery of nicotine to the smoker in attractive, useful form. At normal smoke pH, at or below 6.0, the smoke nicotine is...slowly absorbed by the smoker. . . As the smoke pH increases above about 6.0, an increasing portion of the total smoke nicotine occurs in free form, which is rapidly absorbed by the smoker and...instantly perceived as a nicotine kick."

1973-07-12: BUSINESS: RJR director of marketing and planning R.A. Blevins Jr writes in a memo that free nicotine, advertising expenditures and cigarette size of Winstons and Marlboros all affected market share "independently and collectively," but that "the variability due to 'free nicotine' was significant and its contribution was over and above that of advertising expenditures and [cigarette size]."

1973-07-12: BUSINESS: RJR senior scientist Frank Colby sends Blevins a memo suggesting that the company "develop a new RJR youth-appeal brand based on the concept of going back--at least halfway--to the technological design of the Winston and other filter cigarettes of the 1950s," a cigarette which "delivered more 'enjoyment' or 'kicks' (nicotine)." Colby said that "for public relations reasons it would be impossible to go back all the way to the 1955-type cigarettes."

1974-01-07: Monticello, Minnesota decides to go non-smoking for a day, in a "D-Day" organized by Lynn Smith. The event goes statewide in November, and in 1977 goes national--the first Great American Smokeout.

1974: BUSINESS: Johnny Roventini retires after a 40-year career as Philip Morris pitchman.

1974: CANADA: The Canadian Council on Smoking and Health is formed. Charter members include the Canadian Cancer Society, the Canadian Heart Foundation, the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada and the Canadian Lung Association. The Non-Smokers' Rights Association is also formed. (NCTH)

1974: US Trade Act. The threat of punitive tariffs, as provided under Section 301, will be used to force Asian markets considered to have "unfair" or "discriminatory" trade restrictions to open up to U.S. tobacco companies' products and advertising.

1974-07-1\5: INDUSTRY RESEARCH: Family Practice News covered Alvan R. Feinstein's address to the annual meeting of the Association of American Physicians with this headline: "Smoking Link to Lung Ca[ncer] Termed Diagnostic Bias." The article reads "The more cigarettes a person says he smokes, the more likely he is to be checked by his physician for lung cancer. Thus, cigarette smoking may be contributing more to the diagnosis of lung cancer than to the disease, said Dr. Feinstein of Yale University." Bates #: TITX 0002372 ( http://my.tobaccodocuments.org/tdo/view.cfm?CitID=127054)

1975. Military stops distribution of free cigarettes in C-rations and K-rations.

1975: THAILAND bans smoking on city buses.

1975. BUSINESS: RJR's low tar/nicotine "NOW" cigarette released.

1975. BUSINESS: American Brands assumes control of Britain's Gallaher's

1975: BUSINESS: PM's Marlboro overtakes Winston as the best-selling cigarette in the U.S.

1975: BUSINESS: Philip Morris' net earnings top $200 million.

1975-08-01: REGULATION: MINNESOTA Clean Indoor Air Act, the nation's first statewide anti-second-hand smoke law goes into effect to protect "the public health and comfort and the environment by prohibiting smoking in public places and at public meetings, except in designated smoking areas." It is the first law to require separation of smokers' and nonsmokers.

1975-08-26: REGULATION: Madison, Wisconsin passes an ordinance limiting smoking, the first community in the nation to do so; the effort was led by Margo Redmond of GASP.

1976: REGULATION: Federal Election Committee resolves charges that high-ranking RJR executives were funneling illegal campaign contributions to Republican presidential candidates from 1964 through 1972. The monies were said to have been paid in the form of personal gifts as high as $10,000 each from individual corporate officials, who were repaid from an off-the-books "slush fund," drawn from RJR's overseas customers. No jail terms, no fines: Charles B. Wade, Smith and Peoples had to resign; Alex Galloway, a former chairman who was also implicated during the internal investigation, had retired in 1973. . . Lawyers threatened lawsuits if the exact details of the scandal got out.

1976: SOCIETY: Formation of the Cigarette Pack Collectors Association and first of its conventions. (LB)

1976: LITIGATION: Donna Shimp sues New Jersey Bell Telephone for not protecting her from second-hand smoke. Ruling in her favor, the judge said, "if such rules are established for machines, I see no reason why they should not be held in force for humans."

1976: BUSINESS: Philip Morris exceeds $4 billion in revenues.

1976: MARKET SHARE: Philip Morris' share of the U.S. cigarette market increases to 25.1%; the international tobacco company's share increases to 5.1%.

1976: SOCIETY: The Tobacco Institute provided funds to the Smithsonian Institute for the creation of a one-tenth scale model of the colonial ship Brilliant. The first cargo carried by the Brilliant was tobacco in 1775. (LB)

1977: 1st Great American Smokeout

1977: REGULATION: Berkeley, California became the first community in California to limit smoking in restaurants and other public places.

1978: A Roper Report prepared for the Tobacco Institute concludes that the nonsmokers' rights movement is "the most dangerous development yet to the viability of the tobacco industry that has yet occurred."

The original Surgeon General's report, followed by the first "hazard" warning on cigarette packages, the subsequent "danger" warning on cigarette packages, the removal of cigarette advertising from television and the inclusion of the danger warning in cigarette advertising, were all "blows" of sorts for the tobacco industry. They were, however, blows that the cigarette industry could successfully weather because they were all directed against the smoker himself.
The anti-smoking forces' latest tack, however-on the passive smoking issue-is another matter. What the smoker does to himself may be his business, but what the smoker does to the non-smoker is quite a different matter....six out of ten believe that smoking is hazardous to the nonsmoker's health, up sharply over the last four years. More than two-thirds of non-smokers believe it; nearly half of all smokers believe it.
This we see as the most dangerous development yet to the viability of the tobacco industry that has yet occurred . . . The strategic and long run antidote to the passive smoking issue is, as we see it, developing and widely publicizing clear-cut, credible, medical evidence that passive smoking is not harmful to the non-smoker's health

INFOTAB is now in regular contact with tobacco industry groups in 28 countries...Our strategic objective is to help the industry around the world prevent unreasonable restrictions on its operations and help smokers preserve their freedom to choose whether or not they will smoke and where they will smoke, within the bounds of mutual courtesy...There will also be an emphasis on early-warning information to help the industry anticipate potential issues and anti-smoking initiatives.

1978: BUSINESS: Philip Morris obtains the international cigarette business of the Liggett Group Inc.

1978: Tobacco companies fight a CA referendum on statewide smoking restrictions with a group called "Californians for Common Sense." Though 68% support the referendum, CCS spends $6.6 million lampooning the anti-smoking movement as a nagging Big Brother out to deny personal freedoms. The referndum fails.

1978: USA: A tobacco trade journal reports that "cigarette purchases are 2.5 times as great when an in-store display is present compared to when no advertising or display treatment is employed", and that cigarette sales drop when parents shop with their children. (Tobacco International, 22 Dec 1978, p. 33). (LB)

1979: State Mutual Life Assurance Company of America, Worcester MA, issues a 41 page report titled, "Mortality differences between smokers and non smokers." The abstract reads: "Cigarette smokers are subject to a mortality risk significantly higher than that of non smokers. These differences are real; they emerge at early durations, contrary to what may earlier have been believed. They are not deferred to older ages; they are statistically significant at anyreasonable level."

1979: REGULATION: Minneapolis and St. Paul become the first U.S. cities to ban the distribution of free cigarette samples. (Dan Freeborn, MN Star-Tribune)

1979: DOCUMENTS: A BAT memo said, "We also think that consideration should be given to the hypothesis that high profits additionally associated with the tobacco industry are directly related to the fact that the customer is dependent up on the product . . . We are searching explicitly for a socially acceptable addictive product." On the other hand, the memo warned, "one must question both the ethics and practical possibilities of society/medical opinion permitting the advent of a new habituation process ... "

1979-01: MEDIA: Mother Jones magazine publishes "Why Dick Can't Stop Smoking." According to MoJo in 1996, As a professional courtesy, Mother Jones gave tobacco manufacturers advance notice of the cover story so they could pull their ads from the issue. Philip Morris, Brown & Williamson, and others responded by canceling their entire commitment: several years' worth of cigarette ads. In a show of corporate solidarity, many liquor companies followed suit.

1980: LITIGATION: Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corporation v. Public Service Commission of New York. US Supreme Court sets guidleines for the regulation of commercial speech:

1. For an ad to be protected by the First Amendment, the advertsing must be lawful, and not misleading

2. Given that, for an ad to be banned, the state's interest must be "substantial;"

3. The ban must "directly advance" the state's interest; and

4. The ban must be no more extensive than necessary to further the state's interest

1980: BUSINESS: MARKET SHARE: American Tobacco's share of the US market has fallen to 11%.

1980: BUSINESS: Philip Morris revenues approach $10 billion.

1980: ENTERTAINMENT: Superman II: Lois Lane lights up. In fifty years of comic book appearnces, Lois Lane never smoked. For a reported payment of $42,000, Philip Morris purchases 22 exposures of the Marlboro logo in the movie; Lois Lane, strong role model for teenage girls, gets a Marlboro pack on her desk and begins chain smoking Marlboro Lights. At one point in the film, a character is tossed into a van with a large Marlboro sign on its side, and in the climactic scene the superhero battles amid a maze of Marlboro billboards before zooming off in triumph, leaving in his wake a solitary taxi with a Marloro sign on top. The New York State Journal of Medicine even published an article titled "Superman and the Marlboro Woman: The Lungs of Lois Lane." Thoughout the 80s, "Superman II" is frequently re-run on TV in prime time.

1980: Tobacco companies fight a 2nd CA referendum on statewide smoking restrictions; this time the front group is called "Californians Against Regulatory Excess." As in 1978, the referendum fails.

1981: "A formalized "Blueprint for Action," drafted in 1981 by more than 200 smoking control "experts" attending a National Conference on Smoking OR Health, is often identified as the catalyst for a dramatic change (in anti-smoking activity."-- "The Anti-Smoking Movement"

Dick Schweiker was proposed as Secretary of DHHS (a conservative) and a relatively unknown surgeon by the name of C. Everett Koop was proposed as SG. The latter was considered an ultraconservative and darling of the far right because of his public stand on abortion. Jesse Helms was Koops sponsor in the Senate. Schweiker rescued the Office on Smoking and Health from

1981-01: The Hirayama Study. Takeshi Hirayama, chief of epidemiology of the Research Institute at Tokyo's National Cancer Center, and his associates studied for fourteen years 92,000 nonsmoking wives of smoking husbands to learn what their risk was of contracting lung cancer, compared to a similarly sized control group married to nonsmokers. Nonsmoking wives married to axsmokers or current smokers of up to fourteen cigarettes a day showed a 40 percent elevated risk of lung cancer over wives married to nonsmokers; those married to husbands smoking fifteen to nineteen cigarettes a day had a 60 percent higher risk; and those whose husbands smoked a pack or more a day had a 90 percent heightened risk. The findings were savaged by letters to the BMJ (by, among others, Theodore Sterling, whose projects received $5M in CTR funds between 1973 and 1990),-- and by the Tobacco Institute in full page ads all across the US. Meanwhile, Brown and Williamson documents show that, although the tobacco industry was publicly attacking Hirayama's paper, several of its own experts were privately admitting that his conclusions were valid. B&W counsel J. Wells said both German and British scientists paid by the tobacco industry had reviewed the work and "they believe Hirayama is a good scientist and that his non-smoking wives publication is correct."15 (J. Wells, Re Smoking and Health - Tim Finnegan, Memo to E. Pepples, 1981, 24 July)
Non-smoking wives of heavy smokers have a higher risk of lung cancer: a study from Japan (BMJ, V. 282: pp. 183-185, 17 January 1981

1981-02: David Stockton's Office of Management and Budget "zeroes out" the Office on Smoking and Health in its FY 82 budget. Health and Human Services Secretary Dick Schweiker battles Stockton and the White House to get half the funding restored.

1982: 15TH Surgeon General's Report: The Health Consequences of Smoking -- Cancer: A Report of the Surgeon
General

1982: CONSUMPTION: 624 billion cigarettes were sold in the US this year, the most ever.

1982: BUSINESS: Harrods' (department store) name goes on a a cigarette; this is one of the first instances of tobacco companies "renting names" of other companies (See "Harley Davidson" cigarettes) (LB).

1982: LEGISLATION: Congress passes the No Net Cost Tobacco Program Act, requiring the government's Commodity Credit Corporation, which pays for the government tobacco purchases, to recover all the money it spends on the price-support program. Now taxpayers no longer pay for losses incurred by the program, though they still pay about $16 million a year in administrative costs to run it

1982: Dallas hotelier Lyndon Sanders opens the Non-Smokers Inn; By 1990 an economic slump forced the Non-Smokers Inn to change its policy -- and its name.

1982-01-01: CHINA: The China National Tobacco Corporation is founded.

1983: 16TH Surgeon General's Report: The Health Consequences of Smoking: Cardiovascualr Disease; A report of the Surgeon General Cites smoking as a major cause of coronary heart disease

1983-06-06: MEDIA: Newsweek runs a 4 page article, "Showdown on Smoking" on the nonsmokers' rights movement. Despite months of TI input, the removal of the item from Cover Story status, and the deletion of 3 sidebars (on health effects, political donations/industry lobbying, and a poor business prognosis), TI felt, "the article contains sufficient errors and indicatons of superficiality and poor research so as to leqave an anti-smoking bias in readers' minds." Issues of Newsweek before & after carried 7-10 pages of cigarette ads, but the June 6 issue carried none. According to Larry C. White's Merchants of Death, the estimated loss of revenue as a result of publishing the article: $1 million.

1983: USA: BUSINESS: The creative director of a New York advertising agency spoke of working on tobacco advertisements, "We were trying very hard to influence kids who were 14 to start smoking". (Medical J of Australia, 5 March 1983, p.237). (LB)

1984: 17TH Surgeon General's Report: The Health Consequences of Smoking: Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease, A Report of the Surgeon General Cites smoking as a major cause of chronic obstructive lung disease.

1984: The Advocacy Institute, which pioneered the use of electronic media for tobacco control advocacy through the creation of the Smoking Control Advocacy Resource (SCARCNet), is founded

1984: REGULATION: Tobacco industry is required to turn over a general list of cigarette additives annually to the Department of Health and Human Services' Office on Smoking and Health. The List is then locked in a safe. Disclosure to any other party is a crime. OSH allowed to study the list, but lacks funds.

1984: BUSINESS: The Bakery, Confectionary and Tobacco Workers International Union (BC&T) and the Tobacco Institute joined forces by establishing the Tobacco Industry Labor Management Committee. The purpose is to "contribute to greater cooperation among the various segments of the tobacco industry, in order to improve job security and economic development through public education and research address problems facing the tobacco industry". (LB)

1985: BUSINESS: A tobacco trade journal reports on the job of the tobacco "flavourist" and chemist. One job of the flavourist is to "ensure high satisfaction from an adequate level of nicotine per puff". One job of the chemist is "to ensure adequate levels of nicotine and tar in the smoke". (World Tobacco, March 1987, pp. 97-103).

1985: SOCIETY: Ritz-Carlton Boston hosts a cigar-smoker private dinner party for 20 gentlemen. It soon becomes a regular event in Ritz-Carltons across the country..

1985: Minnesota enacts the first state legislation to earmark a portion of the state cigarette excise tax to support smoking prevention programs.

1986: USA: The CONGRESSIONAL RESEARCH SERVICE of the Library of Congress wrote a 19 page document titled "The proposed prohibition on advertising tobacco products: A constitutional analysis". It concluded that (a) commercial speech does not have the same protection under law as non-commercial speech, (b) Congress had the authority to regulate tobacco advertising and (c) Congress had the authority to completely prohibit tobacco advertising under the conditions set in the Central Hudson case and/or the Posadas case. (LB)

Sorell Schwartz, a Georgetown pharmacologist and tobacco industry consultant, secured funding from two tobacco companies and other sponsors for a seminar on the science of ETS at Georgetown in June 1986. Included among the speakers were several authors of the National Academy of Sciences and U.S. Surgeon General's reports on passive smoking, then being written. Most of the moderators were members of Schwartz's industry consulting team, the "Indoor Air Pollution Advisory Group." Through inadvertence, Schwartz says, he failed to have an assistant notify speakers that the conference was sponsored in part by cigarette companies. For other technical reasons, he also failed to print this information in the program. The American Lung Association protested vehemently and asked Georgetown to cancel the meeting. . . Georgetown did not yield to the Lung Association, but Schwartz decided to cancel "on my own.' In a later pamphlet, the Tobacco Institute describes all this as "a direct threat to scientific integrity' and an "attempt to stifle free speech and academic freedom."

1986: Mr. Potato Head Quits Smoking. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop asks Hasbro to stop including a pipe as a Mr. PH accessory. Mr. Potato Head became the official "spokespud" for the American Lung Society and the Great American Smoke-out.

1986-07: RJR Heir Turns Against Tobacco. The grandson of tobacco company founder RJ Reynolds, PATRICK REYNOLDS, speaks against tobacco at a House Congresional hearing chaired by Congressman Henry Waxman; he advocates a complete ban of tobacco advertising, and recounts his memories of watching his father, RJ REYNOLDS, JR., die from emphysema.

1987: CONSUMPTION: 44 percent of people who had ever smoked had quit as of 1987.

1987: REGULATION: Secretary of Transportation Elizabeth Dole refuses to ban smoking completely on airplanes, despite a unanimous recommendation from the National
Academy of Scientists and Surgeon General C. Everett Koop.

1987: LEGISLATION: CA: Willie Brown's "Napkin Deal" is passed. It bars product liability actions for inherently unsafe products, on the grounds that consumer use of those products was "knowing" and "voluntary." Outlined on a linen napkin at the watering hole Frank Fat's by Bill Lockyer and then-Speaker Brown, the law was one of the most famous back room deals ever struck in Sacramento. (Code of Civil Procedure 1714.45). It takes effect on Jan. 1, 1988, and remains in effect for exactly 10 years, until the Calif. legislature, shocked by revelations from secret documents, strips the industry's immunity away again, effective Jan. 1, 1998.

1987: BUSINESS: Philip Morris execs are blessed by Cardinal Cooke. For the Treasures of the Vatican exhibit, Terence Cardinal Cooke, then the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York, led a prayer for Mr. Weissman and his Philip Morris colleagues. After the benediction, Frank Saunders, PM VP, said, "We are probably the only cigarette company on this earth to be blessed by a cardinal."

1987: LITIGATION: INDONESIA: Lawyer R.O. Tambunan, on behalf of Indonesian youth, files a class-action suit for Rp 1 trillion against cigarette producer PT Bentoel, for allegedly violating the law by using the words Remaja Jaya (Successful Youth) as the brand name of its product. The Central Jakarta District Court dismissesthe suit, saying that Tambunan had no right to take action as a representative of Indonesian youth.

1987: REGULATION: Congress bans smoking on domestic flights of less than two hours. Takes effect in 1988.

1987: REGULATION: Beverly Hills, CA, bans smoking in restuarants. Barry Fogel (Jacopos) the restauranteur who is the nominal head of the Beverly Hills Restaurant Association, later said the group was fabricated,, and that he regretted having anything to do with it. BHRA was organized by Rudy Cole according to Consumer Reports. It took a survey of Beverly Hills restaurants which found business decreased 30% durng a 1987 smoking ban. "What if they Passed a Law That Took Away 30 Percent of Your Business" read an ad that the Tobacco Institute ran in some restaurant trade publications. In 1994, Fogel wrote to the NYC council that he had been president in 1988 of the BHRA, which successfully fought a local smokefree bill, He said the BHRA had been organized and financed almost exclusively by the tobacco industry. Fogel said he regretted his participation in the group. He owns the Jacopo restaurants, and wrote that since they went nonsmoking, "sales have risen." Fogel: 'There was no Beverly Hills Restaurant Association before the smokefree ordinance. We were organized by the tobacco industry. The industry even flew some of our members by Lear Jet to another California city considering smokefree restaurant legislation." Mr. Fogel goes on to say "I regret my participation with the tobacco industry." BHRA was represented by then-partner Mickey Kantor of Manatt, Phelps & Phillips law firm in Los Angeles

1987: JAPAN: A tobacco trade jcournal reports on a group of Japanese "smoke lovers" who participated in a panel discussion on smoking. One panelist said, "The life expectancy of Japanese is said to be the world's longest now, and why must we be so timidly concerned about health? Let's enjoy life and smoking" (World Tobacco, Sept 87, p.18). (LB)

1987: JAPAN: The Tokyo Customs Office attributes the increase in cigarette imports to the permeation of promotional activities of the suppliers of foreign tobacco products. (World Tobacco, Sept 87, p.7).(LB)

1988: 20TH Surgeon General's Report: The Health Consequences of Smoking: Nicotine Addiction, A Report of the Surgeon General (C. Everett Koop) calls nicotine "a powerfully addicting drug." In 618-page summary of over 2,000 studies of nicotine and its effects on the body, Koop declares, "It is now clear that . . . cigarettes and other form of tobacco are addicting and that actions of nicotine provide the pharmacologic basic of tobacco addiction," .

1988: LITIGATION: FINLAND: First tobacco trial in Europe. Pentti Aho, 66, is held responsible for his own ill health.

1988: LITIGATION: CIPOLLONE: New Jersey Judge Lee H. Sarokin, presiding over the Cipollone trial, says he has found evidence of a conspiracy by 3 tobacco companies that is vast in its scope, devious in its purpose, and devastating in its results."

1988: DOCUMENTS: .Cipollone trial reveals "Motives and Incentives in Ciragette Smoking," a 1972 confidential report prepared by the Philip Morris Research Center of Richmond, Virginia. It reads in part, The cigarette should be conceived not as a product but as a package. The product is nicotine. . . . Think of the cigarette as a dispenser for a dose unit of nicotine. . . . Think of a puff of smoke as the vehicle of nicotine. . . . Smoke is beyond question the most optimized vehicle of nicotine and the cigarette the most optimized dispenser of smoke.

1988: CONSUMPTION: New Teen Smokers: 710,000

1988: BUSINESS: Philip Morris report, "Smoking Among High School Seniors" suggests fewer youngsters were smoking in the early 1980s because participation in athletic programs was increasing.

1988: BUSINESS: Philip Morris pays $13.6 billion for Kraft, Inc. As in the General Foods deal, most of the financing is provided by non-U.S. sources.

1988: SPORTS: Olympics goes smoke-free. When the 1988 Winter Olympics were held in Calgary, Alberta, Dr. John Hamilton Read successfully lobbies to have the Games smoke-free. All subsequent Games also ban smoking.

1988-04-07: CESSATION: First World No-Tobacco Day, sponsored by World Health Organization as part of WHO's 40th anniversary. Slogan: Tobacco or health: The choice is yours

1988-04-18: INDUSTRY RESEARCH: Shook Hardy recommends renewal of $484G Feinstein "CTR Special Project" "Dr. Alvan Feinstein has requested a renewal of his CTR Special Project on improved scientific methods in clinical epidemiology. Funding is requested for two years in the amount of $484,960." Bates #:2015006928-6929 http://my.tobaccodocuments.org/tdo/view.cfm?ShowCitation=yes&CitID=2292049

1988-06: LITIGATION: Liggett Group (L&M, Chesterfield) ordered to pay Antonio Cipollone $400,000 in compensatory damages for its contribution to his wife's death. In the years before the 1966 warning labels, Liggett found to have given Cipollone an express warranty its products were safe. First ever financial award in a liability suit against a tobacco company; award later overturned on technicality; plaintiffs, out of money, drop case

1988-Fall: BUSINESS: Ross Johnson informs RJR Nabisco board he intends to lead a management buy-out, and purchase the company for $17 billion. The ensuing debacle will become the largest LBO ever, with Henry Kravitz' KKR emerging the winner in 1989, paying a record $24.9 billion.

1988-11-17: Great American Smokeout; ex-Winston model David Goerlitz quits smoking after 24 years.

1988-12 to 1993-03:Jeffrey Wigand works at Brown & Williamson.

1988-89: CANADA: LEGISLATION: Federal laws are enacted to prohibit tobacco advertising and ensure smoke-free workplaces. Cigarette packs must carry one of four specified health warnings: "Smoking reduces life expectancy;" "Smoking is the major cause of lung cancer;" "Smoking is a major cause of heart disease;" or "Smoking during pregnancy can harm the baby." (NCTH)

1989: BUSINESS: PM spends $300,000 test-marketing a version of its Next brand called "De-Nic," which contained only .1mg nicotine. The Kansas City Star reported that apparently the major market for Philip Morris De-Nic cigarettes was tobacco researchers, who ran out and bought them for use in studies in which it was found that though they tasted very similar to regular cigarettes, and were smoked in much the same way, smokers brain waves did not change as they do with nicotine cigarettes.

1989: BUSINESS: PM combines Kraft Inc. and General Foods Corp. to form Kraft General Foods, the largest food company in the United States.

1989: CANADA: The government requires cigarette manufacturers to list the additives and amounts for each brand. RJ Reynolds temporarily withdraws its brands, and reformulates them so they are different from their US versions. Philip Morris withdraws its cigarettes from the Canadian market entirely.

1989: UAR: Dubai Islamic Bank in the United Arab Emirates has banned smoking by staff and customers because Islam forbids harming the body. (Reuters, 27 July 19189). (LB)

1989-01: B&W hires Wigand as Vice President for Research and Development, ostensibly to develop a safer cigarette.

1989-02-08: BUSINESS: KKR buys RJR Nabisco for $24.88 Billion (or, according to some accounts, $29.6 billion). Lou Gerstner from American Express is appointed CEO

1990: REGULATION: Dr. David Kessler comes to the FDA. He will stay till 1997, his tenure marked by the attempt, invalidated by the Supreme Court in 1999, to regulate cigarettes as nicotine delivery devices.

1990: USA: Ellis Milan, president of the Retail Tobacco Distributors of America said, "President George Bush often talks of 1,000 points of light. I'd like to think those points of light are coming from the glowing ends of cigars, cigarettes and pipes across the country, and symbolize the cornerstone of this nation -- tobacco"(LB)

1990: INDIA: A tobacco trade journal reports that India is selling its first cigarette specifically aimed at women, MS Special Filters, "the sort of market targeting that can get you pilloried in the US." (World Tobacco, March 1990, p. 11). (LB)

1990: REGULATION: NYC Passes Tobacco Sampling Law. Prohibits giveaway or discounted distribution of tobacco products in public places and at public events. Exempts tobacco retailers in their stores and wholesalers or manufacturers.

1990: REGULATION: San Luis Obispo, California becomes the first city in the world to ban smoking in all public buildings including bars and restaurants.

1990: BUSINESS: The Uptown Fiasco. RJR begins test-marketing "Uptown" cigarettes targetting blacks. Health and Human Services secretary Louis Sullivan, along with many black civic and religious leaders denounce the cigarette. RJR cancels the cigarette. The success of the campaign leads to the founding of the National Association of African Americans for Positive Imagery (NAAAPI) in 1991.

1991: LITIGATION: Mildred Wiley, a nonsmoker, dies of lung cancer at 56. Her husband, Philip of Marion, Indiana, will bring a suit that in December, 1995 will be the first to establish second hand smoke as a workplace injury eligible for workers' compensation.

1991: LITIGATION: Grady Carter is diagnosed with lung cancer.

1991: ADVERTISING: Joe Camel's own line of merchandise is touted by RJR as bringing in $40 Million/year in advertising billings.

1991-05-31: World No-Tobacco Day. Slogan: Public places and transport: better be tobacco-free

1991-06: BUSINESS: Domini Social Equity Fund is created by Amy Domini to exclude war-related, alcohol and tobacco stocks.

1991-07: INDUSTRY RESEARCH: Consumers' Research Magazine publishes "Passive Smoking: How Great a Hazard?" by Huber, Gary L; Brockie, Robert E; Mahajan, Vijay K. "ETS is so highly diluted that it is not even appropriate to call it smoke."

1992: CONSUMPTION: Among smokers age 12 to 17 years, a 1992 Gallup survey found that 70% said if they had to do it over again, they would not start smoking, and 66% said that they want to quit. Fifty-one percent of the teen smokers surveyed had made a serious effort to stop smoking--but had failed.

1992: 23rd Surgeon General's Report: Smokmg and Health in the Amencas: A 1992 Report of the Surgeon General, in Collaboration with the Pan Amencan Health Organization

1992: STATISTICS: Per-capita consumption of cigarettes stands at 7 per day among adult Americans

1992: CESSATION: Nicotine patch is introduced.

1992: LITIGATION: Supreme Court rules that the 1965 warning label law does not shield tobacco companies from suits accusing them of deceiving the public about the health effects of smoking.

1992: LEGISLATION: NY State passes Adolescent Tobacco Use Prevention Act. Prohibits free distribution of tobacco products to the public, tobacco sales through vending machines or to minors. Requires merchants to post signs saying no sales to minors and to ask for age identification of anyone under 25. Allows parent of a minor who purchased tobacco to bring a complaint against the vendor.

1993: CONSUMPTION: 70% of adults who smoke wanted to quit completely; Smoking prevalence among U.S. adults (18 years of age and older) is estimated to be 25%, compared with 26.3% for 1992. Forty-six million adults currently smoke (24 million men, 22 million women). Thirty-two million American smokers (70% of all adult smokers) report that they want to quit smoking completely. Women (73%) are more likely to want to quit smoking than men (67%). By 1993, an estimated 38.2% of high school dropouts who had ever smoked had quit, compared with 45.3% of high school graduates and 65.4% of college graduates. --"Cigarette smoking among adults--United States, 1993," CDC, December 23, 1994, issue of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR)

1993: "Allies: The ACLU and the Tobacco Industry" reveals an otherwise undisclosed $500,000 given by Philip Morris to the ACLU between 1987 and 1992, along with additional sums from RJR Nabisco and the Tobacco Institute.. The report was written by Morton Mintz in cooperation with Public Citizen, the Advocacy Institute, the American Heart Association and Ralph Nader.

1993: CANADA: LEGISLATION: Federal law is enacted to raise the legal age for buying tobacco to 18. (NCTH)

1993: Major League Baseball institutes a tobacco prohibition policy for all minor-league teams, coaches and staff.

1993: LEGISLATION: NYC passes Tobacco Product Regulation Act. Bans out-of-package tobacco sales. Places age restrictions on handling. Prohibits sale of tobacco products to minors. Requires one public health message for every four tobacco ads appearing on city property. Bans use of tobacco products on school property.

1994: STATISTICS: Of those who smoke, 70 percent expressed an interest in quitting. Another 28 percent said they had no desire to give up smoking. Forty-eight percent said they want to quit and have tried to do so but failed, and 22 percent want to quit but have not tried. (Source: USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll, March 1994)

1994-02: CANADA: Tobacco taxes are slashed to curb runaway bootlegging from the US.

1994-02-22: SCIENCE: Scientists from Canada reported finding evidence of cigarette smoke in fetal hair, the first biochemical proof that the offspring of non-smoking mothers can be affected by passive cigarette smoke.

1994-02: LEGISLATION: FDA commissioner David Kessler announces plans to consider regulation of tobacco as a drug.

1994-03-24: LITIGATION: Philip Morris sues ABC for $10 billion over the 2 "Day One" segments. (Two other events were occurring this year: ABC was in the process of being sold to Disney, and the huge communications bill was going through Congress. Lobbyists swarmed Congress, especially the powerful chairman of the House Commerce Committee, VA Republican Tom Bliley, often dubbed"The Congressman from Philip Morris.")

1994-03-29: LITIGATION: New Orleans, LA. Castano case begins; a 60-attorney coalition files what will become the nation's largest class-action lawsuit plaintiffs charge tobacco companies hid their knowledge of the addicting qualities of tobacco.

1994-04: IRAN:

1994-04: BUSINESS: BAT Industries agrees to buy American Tobacco from American Brands for $1 billion.

1994-07: Ex-tobacco lobbyist Victor Crawford makes first national appearance for tobacco control. Dying of cancer, Crawford is featured with ex-surgeon general C. Everett Koop in a Coalition on Smoking and Health radio spot which urges a $2 federal cigarette tax to help fund health care reform.

1994-11: California: Prop. 188 is overwhelmingly defeated. The tobacco industry spent $18 M to pass a measure sponsored by "Californians for Statewide Smoking Restrictions" that would have pre-empted stronger local laws, along with the coming 1995 statewide ban on smoking in restaurants.

1994-12: POLITICS: FDA gets letters from Congress. 124 members of the House sent a sharply worded letter to the FDA, claiming the agency's tobacco proposal would put 10,000 jobs at risk and "trample First Amendment rights to advertise legal products to adults." Two weeks later, 32 senators signed a virtually identical letter. (According to Common Cause, those senators who signed the letter had received an average of $31,368 from tobacco, compared to $11,819 for those senators who did not sign. Similarly, the House signatories received an average of $19,446, in contrast to $6,728 for other Congress members.)--Mother Jones, 4/96

1995: BUSINESS: MARKET SHARE BY COMPANY:

1. PM 43%

2. RJR 28%

3. Brown & Williamson 11%

5. American Tobacco Co. 7%

3. Lorillard 7%

3. Liggett & Myers 2%

1995: GOVERNMENT: Tobacco companies give the GOP $2.4 million in "soft" dollars. The top two soft money contributors to the GOP this year are Philip Morris ($975,149) and RJR Nabisco ($696,450). Tobacco industry PACs gave $841,120 to Republican members of Congress.

1995: LEGISLATION: New York City passes Smoke-Free Air Act. Strengthens Clean Indoor Air Act (1988) by banning smoking in the dining areas of all restaurants with more than 35 seats. Limits smoking to the bar area of restaurants, with certain specifications, and to a maximum of 25 percent of a restaurant's outdoor seats. Bans smoking in outdoor seating areas, such as in sports stadiums and recreational areas. Limits smoking in the workplace to a separately enclosed and ventilated room and to private offices as long as the door is kept closed and no more than three people are present, each of whom agrees to allow smoking. Prohibits smoking at all times in both indoor and outdoor areas of day-care centers. Exempts restaurants seating 35 people or less. Allows smoking in stand-alone bars. Allows smoking in sports arenas in separate smoking rooms, with some limitations.

1995: BUSINESS: Financial World ranks Marlboro the world's No. 2 most valuable brand behind Coca-Cola (value: $38.7 billion). The brand also has 29% of the US market--the highest market share it has ever had.

1995: CANADA: LEGISLATION: The Supreme Court of Canada strikes down the federal ban on tobacco advertising. Tobacco companies launch an aggressive advertising campaign, using billboards, newspaper ads and event sponsorships. Ottawa releases A Blueprint to Protect the Health of Canadians, an outline of proposed legislation to reinstate the advertising ban, but no bill has yet been introduced in Parliament. (NCTH)

1995-07-12: AMA excoriates tobacco industry over "secret" B&W papers. AMA devotes entire July 19, 1995 issue of JAMA to a study of the papers, finds The evidence is unequivocal -- the US public has been duped by the tobacco industry. No right-thinking individual can ignore the evidence. We should all be outraged, and we should force the removal of this scourge from our nation . . .

1995-08-10: President Clinton declares nicotine an addictive drug; FDA sends President Clinton proposals for regulating the sale and marketing of tobacco products to minors

1995-08-10: LITIGATION: The 5 largest tobacco companies file suit in a North Carolina court challenging the FDA's authority to regulate tobacco and advertising.. The advertising industry files in North Carolina within days. Smokeless tobacco manufacturers U.S. Tobacco Co. and Conwood Co file suit in Tennessee.

1995-08-31: LITIGATION: $1.9 million awarded plaintiff Milton Horowitz in Kent Micronite filter case; only the 2nd time an award has been given in a liability case against a tobacco company. However, the suit concerned asbestos, not tobacco

1996: BUSINESS: Merger of Richemont's tobacco interests with those of Rembrandt Group Limited

1996-01-08: LITIGATION: Supreme Court refuses to hear an ACLU challenge to the city of North Miami's 1990 ban on hiring smokers. Lower insurance costs outweighed the privacy issue, the Florida Supreme Court had ruled in 1995. The argument was made that three members of the court -- Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas -- could not be hired in North Miami because they smoke. (Kurtz vs. North Miami, No. 95-545)

1996-02-05: POLITICS: Geoffrey Bible, CEO of Philip Morris Cos. Inc., chairs a dinner underwritten by Philip Morris for the Republican Governors Association, and speaks to the governors about tobacco's benefits to the economy. The gala dinner pulls in an unprecedented $2.6 million.

1996-05: MEDIA: The May Vanity Fair contains a massive, 22-page article by Marie Brenner on the inside story of the CBS/Wigand story. The issue contains no tobacco ads. Michael Mann will use this article to make the movie, "The Insider."

1996-05-15: BUSINESS: Philip Morris and United States Tobacco Co. offer their own plan to stop youth access, in order to avoid FDA control..

1996-05-20: MEDIA: The May 20, 1996 People Weekly carries 2 tobacco articles, a profile of Stanton Glantz, and an excerpt from Grisham's The Runaway Jury. The issue contains no tobacco ads..

1996-05-31: World No-Tobacco Day. Slogan: Sports and arts without tobacco: Play it tobacco-free

1996-06: CDC adds prevalence of cigarette smoking as a nationally notifiable condition, bringing to 56 the number of diseases and conditions designated by Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE) as reportable by states. This marks the first time a
behavior, rather than a disease or illness, has been considered
nationally reportable.(LB)

1996-12: TRAVEL: St. Louis-based CLIPPER CRUISE LINE bans smoking anywhere on one of its cruise ships.

1997: STATISTICS: US: Forty-eight million Americans have quit in the 21 years since the first Smokeout in 1976; 48 million still smoke; about 34 million say they want to quit. Between 1965 and 1990, adult smoking declined from 42 percent to 25 percent. The average age of a first-time smoker is 13. More than 3 million American adolescents smoke cigarettes.

1997: CONSUMPTION: Americans spent an estimated $51.9 billion on tobacco products in 1997, or just under 1% of their disposable income. Of this amount, $48.7 billion (or 94%) was spent on cigarettes, $2.2 billion on smokeless and smoking tobacco, and $0.9 billion on cigars. (CRS)

1997: BUSINESS: China is by far the largest producer of cigarettes in the world; the second largest producer is the United States. In 1997 China produced an estimated 1.7 trillion pieces, almost two and one half times the 720 billion pieces produced in the United States. The United States is by far the largest cigarette exporting nation in the world, with exports in 1997 estimated about 217 billion pieces, or 21% of the world total. China is the largest consumer market in the world, with over 300 million smokers consuming 1.7 trillion cigarettes in 1997. (CRS)

1997: BUSINESS: Targacept is established as a wholly owned subsidiary of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company

1997-03-20: Liggett Tobacco and 22 states settle lawsuits; Liggett admits smoking is addictive, can cause cancer, and the industry markets cigarettes to teenagers; agrees to turn over documents and to warn on every pack that smoking is addictive.

1997-03-21: Liggett issues statement: "We at Liggett know and acknowledge that, as the Surgeon General and respected medical researchers have found, cigarette smoking causes health problems, including lung cancer, heart and vascular disease and emphysema. Liggett acknowledges that the tobacco industry markets to 'youth,' which means those under 18 years of age, and not just those 18-24 years of age."

1997-04-18: Attorneys General confirm they are talking with PM and RJR about a Settlement

1997-09-17: REGULATION: President Clinton refuses to endorse the proposed tobacco settlement, instead suggesting Congress work on sweeping legislation that first and foremost reduces teen smoking; second, gives FDA control of nicotine; third, penalizes the industry if teen smoking doesn't go down. "The tobacco bailout deal is dead," said Minnesota AG Hubert Humphrey III, "This gives us a new chance to move forward and do the right thing."

1997-10-16: UK: FORMULA 1 SCANDAL: Formula 1 chief Bernie Ecclestone, who previously had given Labour a one million pound donation, visits 10 Downing Street. The next day Tony Blair seeks an exemption for Formula One from the UK's upcoming tobacco ban.

1997-10-17: BARNES Suit--First of the "Little Castano" suits--is thrown out by Pennsylvania judge; Gives impetus to national settlement movemement.

1997-10-23: Philip Morris Announces "Accord" Smoking System

1997-11-04: UK: FORMULA 1 SCANDAL: It is disclosed that Health Minister Tessa Jowell has written to the European Union asking for motor-racing to be exempted from a EU-wide ban on tobacco advertising in sport. The "U-Turn" becomes the Labour party's first major scandal when it is found that Ms. Jowell's husband had been a non-executive director for an F1 company, and that Labour received a $1.7 million donation from Bernie Ecclestone in January.

1997-11-07: UK: FORMULA 1 SCANDAL: Tony Blair and Gordon Brown discuss the Ecclestone affair and decide that Labour should write a letter to the Neill Committee on Standards in Public Life seeking advice on whether they should accept a second donation from the tycoon.

1997-11-10: UK: FORMULA 1 SCANDAL: In a live interview with BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Brown denies any knowledge of the Ecclestone donation. Sir Patrick responds to Labour's letter and says it would be sensible both to hand back the original 1million donation and not to accept the second gift.

1997-11-16: UK: FORMULA 1 SCANDAL: In a TV interview , Blair claims Labour had turned down second Ecclestone donation 'before any journalist had been in touch'.

1997-12-31: LITIGATION: MINNESOTA Judge Fitzpatrick fines BROWN & WILLIAMSON $100,000 for failure to turn over American Tobacco Co. documents now held by Gallaher in Britain. This is the most severe court sanction against a tobacco company in decades.

1998-03: PROPAGANDA: BAT leaks information to the London Telegraph on the 10-year, $2 million study by the International agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) (an affiliate of WHO). BAT's information was printed uncritically. The ET author writes that the study was buried because it found no risk. The study in fact found a 16% increase in risk in lung cancer for non-smokers, a result consistent with earlier studies. Although the results were clear and comparable to those found by others, the number of people in the study was too small to reach statistical significance (at the 95 percent level). The findings were thus supportive of earlier studies showing that passive smoking increases cancer risk, but taken alone would not have been conclusive. However, the study was described by newspapers and the tobacco industry as demonstrating no increase in risk. . . Ong and Glantz analysed industry documents released in US litigation and interviewed IARC investigators. The Philip Morris tobacco company feared that the study (and a possible IARC monograph on second-hand smoke) would lead to increased restrictions in Europe, so they spearheaded a $2 million inter-industry, three-prong strategy to subvert IARC's work. The scientific strategy attempted to undercut IARC's research and to develop industry-directed research to counter the anticipated findings; the communications strategy planned to shape opinion by manipulating the media and the public; the government strategy sought to prevent increased smoking restrictions. For full links to items from IARC, ET, BAT secret docs, etc., see the ASH-UK Roundup

1998-05-02: LITIGATION: NEW YORK: A New York State Judge places The TOBACCO INSTITUTE and the COUNCIL FOR TOBACCO RESEARCH under temporary receivership, in response to a state suit charging the organizations abused their tax-exempt status under New York law, where they were incorporated, by acting as tobacco -funded "fronts" that serve "as propaganda arms of the industry."

1998-05-08: LITIGATION: MINNESOTA: Tobacco makes $6.1B settlement with Minnesota and Blue Cross/Blue Shield. The industry agrees to the dissolution of the Council for Tobacco Research.

1998-05-27: LITIGATION: WYNN: Alabama Circuit Judge William Wynn, files suit seeking to revoke the charters of the nation's five major cigarette companies. Wynn called for the criminal enforcement of tobacco companies' misdemeanors, and upon finding that the companies have broken the law, that the state should revoke the companies' charters to do business in Alabama.

1998-05-31: World No-Tobacco Day. Slogan: Growing up without tobacco

1998-06-10: LITIGATION: WIDDICK Trial: Largest damages in tobacco litigation history are awarded. Jury finds for Widdick, orders B&W to pay almost $1 million. This is Norwood S. Wilner's 2nd win against B&W.

1998-08: TRAVEL: RENAISSANCE CRUISES claims the distinction of launching the world's first smoke-free ship: the "R1," in which only crew may smoke--in a room off limits to passengers. It tours the Mediterranean.

1998-08-13: LITIGATION: WIDDICK: A Florida appeals court rules that the Widdick trial was held in the wrong county.

1999: BUSINESS: Merger of Rothmans International with British American Tobacco - Richemont holds 23.3% effective interest in the enlarged British American Tobacco.

1999-01: LITIGATION: BOLIVIA files suit against the tobacco industry in a Texas court.

1999-01: SETTLEMENTS: "Phase II" farmer payments established. The four largest U.S. cigarette-makers agree to establish a $5.15 billion trust fund to help compensate farmers and allotment holders for the expected drop in production resulting from the AG nationwide settlement

1999-01-21: AGRICULTURE: 4 major tobacco companies agree to set up a $5.15 billion trust fund for growers.

1999-01-27: LITIGATION: VENEZUELA files suit against the tobacco industry in a Miami court.

1999-02-04: AGRICULTURE: Tobacco companies agree to give growers $5.15 billion to compensate them for lost income because of the AG settlement.

1999-02-07: UK: Britain's royal family orders the removal of its seal of approval from Gallaher's Benson and Hedges cigarettes. The company is given till the year 2000 to remove the royal crest.

1999-03-09: BUSINESS: RJ Reynolds announces that it will sell its international tobacco unit to Japan Tobacco for $8 billion and split its US tobacco and food businesses.

1999-03-30: LITIGATION: JOANN WILLIAMS-BRANCH V. PHILIP MORRIS: Oregon jury returns $81 Million verdict against PM, giving Jesse Williams' family about $800,000 in compensatory damages and $79.5 million punitive damages. The award is later cut to $32M, then reinstated in June, 2002.

1999-04-26: The Supreme Court agrees to decide whether to give the Food and Drug Administration jurisdiction over tobacco. The Court agrees to hear a Clinton administration appeal.

1999-05: WHO launches Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. World Health Organization member countries unanimously back a resolution calling for an international attempt to regulate tobacco use; a record-breaking 50 nations of 191 pledg financial and political support. WCTC is due to come into effect in 2003.

1999-05-10: LITIGATION: KARNEY VS. Philip Morris, et.al.: A jury in Memphis, TN, finds for the defense in a trial that consolidated the suits of 3 plaintiffs: Bobby Newcomb, James W. Karney and Florence Bruch (McDaniel). Jurors found RJR 30% responsible for Newcomb's lung cancer, and B&W 20% responsible, but Tennessee law requires damages only if a company is found more than 50% responsible.

1999-05-13: LITIGATION: STEELE VS. BROWN & WILLIAMSON: A federal jury in Kansas City, Mo., finds the company was not at fault in the case of Charles Steele, a smoker who died of lung cancer in 1995.

1999-05-27: BUSINESS: PHILIP MORRIS board member Rupert Murdoch's Fox Entertainment Group announces that it will launch a new Web-cable property called The Health Network.

1999-05-31: World No-Tobacco Day. Slogan: Leave the pack behind

1999-06-15: BUSINESS: RJR NABISCO Split is completed. The stock of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Holdings Inc. begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "RJR."

1999-07-07: LITIGATION: ENGLE jurors rule that smoking causes diseases such as lung cancer and that U.S. cigarette makers hid the dangers of their products from the public.

1999-09-22: LITIGATION: DOJ: US Justice Department sues the tobacco industry to recover billions of government dollars spent on smoking-related health care, accusing cigarette-makers of a "coordinated campaign of fraud and deceit."

1999-10-06: BUSINESS: Tabacalera and Seita announce plans to join forces. The new combined company will be known as Altadis.

1999-10-13: BUSINESS: Philip Morris acknowledges scientific consensus on smoking. "There is an overwhelming medical and scientific consensus that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema and other serious diseases in smokers,'' its website, http://www.philipmorris.com, states. ``there is no safe cigarette . . . cigarette smoking is addictive, as that term is most commonly used today.''

1999-10-20: LITIGATION: ENGLE: 3rd District Court of Appeal clears the way for a lump-sum, punitive damage decision in the Penalty Phase.

1999-11-12: LOBBYING: New York Lobbying Commission hits Philip Morris with the largest fine in commission history, $75,000; forbids PM's chief Albany representative Sharon Portnoy from lobbying in New York state for three years.

1999-12-01: LITIGATION: Supreme Court hears FDA arguments.

1999-12-08: LITIGATION: FRANCE: SEITA is found partly responsible for the death of smoker Richard Gourlain. This is the first time a tobacco company has been held responsible in a health liability case in France.

2000: JAPAN: Emperor Arkihito ends the tradition (begun by Hirohito in 1964) of giving out cigarettes to his staff on his birthday.

2000: BUSINESS: Reduction in the group's effective interest in British American Tobacco to 21 per cent through partial disposal of holding of preference shares.

2000-01-19: CANADA: Health Minister Unveils Gruesome Labels. Images of cancerous lungs, diseased mouths, and droopy cigarettes imitating limp penises are among a series of 16 new visual warnings that will have to cover half of each cigarette pack sold in Canada under regulatory reforms unveiled on Jan 19 by Health Minister Allan Rock.

2000-02-16: Farmers sue tobacco companies in a $69 billion lawsuit seeking to recover damages they say were caused by the industry's settlement with the U.S. government.

2000-02-08: Wholesalers and distributors file suit against major tobacco companies, accusing them of collusion/price fixing because they raised cigarette prices "by the exact amount" during 1997 and 1998.

2000-03-02: REGULATION: Philip Morris VP Steven Parrish calls for government regulation of tobacco. At a CASA conference, Parrish shared the podium and discussion with Dr. David Kessler, and said that nicotine is an addictive drug and that the Food and Drug Administration should regulate tobacco, PM said it still opposes FDA regulation of nicotine as a drug.

California Superior Court jury finds that the Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds acted with malice, knew about the health hazards of smoking and deliberately misled the public about those dangers. It also found that the two companies committed fraud. Awards $1.7 M to Leslie Whiteley.

"No matter how important, conspicuous, and controversial the issue, and regardless of how likely the public is to hold the Executive Branch politically accountable, an administrative agency's power to regulate in the public interest must always be grounded in a valid grant of authority from Congress. "

2000-03-29: LITIGATION: Federal jury rules UST violated antitrust laws; U.S. Tobacco Co ordered to pay $1.05 billion to Conwood. The Kentucky jury awarded $350 million in damages to Conwood; U.S. District Judge Thomas Russell trebled that amount pursuant to federal law. Conwood charged that UST had engaged in anti-competitive business practices in trying to control point-of-sale advertising, including vandalizing and removing Conwood in-store display racks.
After a monthlong trial, the jury deliberated for almost four hours on Tuesday before setting damages at $350 million against Greenwich, Conn.-based U.S. Tobacco. Under federal antitrust laws, the damages were automatically tripled.

2000-08: BUSINESS: RJR spins out Targacept. A world leader in neuronal nicotinic receptor (NNR) research and development, Targacept is dedicated to the design, discovery and development of a new class of drugs that will treat Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, ulcerative colitis and others.

2000-09-18: UK: FORMULA 1 SCANDAL: Journalist Andrew Rawnsley, in newspaper exerpts from his book, Servants Of The People, alleges that Chancellor Gordon Brown and PM Tony Blair lied in television interviews about details of Labour's 1m donation from Bernie Ecclestone.

2000-10-12: LITIGATION: JONES: A Florida jury decides that the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. was responsible for the death of Robert Jones' wife Suzanne M. Jones, and awards compensatory damages totaling $200,028.57 for negligence on the part of RJR and a defective cigarette design.

2001-01-19: George Bush is inaugurated as United States President. His cabinet nominees include WI Gov. Tommy Thompson for Secretary of Health and Human Services, John Ashcroft as Attorney General, and Gale Norton as Secretary of the Interior

2001-01-22: LITIGATION: WV: Blankenship "medical monitoring" trial is declared a mistrial when witness Farone inadvertently references the verboten subject: addiction. Ohio County Circuit Judge Arthur Recht had said a few days earlier, "I guarantee I'm smarter now than I was a month ago. As the case goes on you get a clearer picture, and it is clear now: Addiction is, I believe, a necessary element in this case -- the inability to quit."

2001-05-31: RELIGION: LEBANON: Senior Shiite Muslim cleric Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah issues a religious edict (fatwa) ordering his followers to stop smoking. ''A smoker is committing two crimes, one against himself and the other against the one inhaling next to him," he tells AP.

2001-06-13: BUSINESS: Philip Morris sells off 16% of Kraft. The Kraft Foods (KFT) IPO begins trading at $31, and ends the day at $31.25, raising $8.68 billion in the nation's second-largest initial public offering ever. Philip Morris keeps 275 million Class A shares and all 1.18 billion of the Class B shares in Kraft, thus retaining almost 98% of voting rights in Kraft. For many analysts, the "tobacco taint" remains.

2001-06-19: LITIGATION: Dept. of Justice assembles a team to negotiate a settlement over its racketeering lawsuit.

2001-07-16: CZECH REPUBLIC: News reports reveal that Philip Morris released to the government a PM-commissioned Arthur D. Little report which concluded that smokers save the state money--by dying early. While the Czech media yawns, other international media provide heavy coverage and extremely negative commentary.

2001-07-25: Steven C. Parrish, a senior vice president, apologizes for the Arthur D. Little report, saying in a Wall St. Journal interview, "We understand that this was not only a terrible mistake, but that it was wrong. . . To say it's totally inappropriate is an understatement."

2001-07-26: Philip Morris publicly apologizes for the Arthur D. Little report. The statment reads, "For one of our tobacco companies to commission this study was not just a terrible mistake, it was wrong. All of us at Philip Morris, no matter where we work, are extremely sorry for this. No one benefits from the very real, serious and significant diseases caused by smoking. We understand the outrage that has been expressed and we sincerely regret this extraordinarily unfortunate incident. We will continue our efforts to do the right thing in all our businesses, acknowledging mistakes when we make them and learning from them as we go forward."

2001-08-08: BAT breaks into South Korean market; announces plans to invest $1bn in South Korean cigarette operations, beginning with a new $80M factory, BAT becomes the first foreign company to break KTG's monopoly.

The jury plainly, and with substantial evidentiary support, found Philip Morris's conduct reprehensible. The record fully supports findings that Philip Morris knew by the late 1950s and early 1960s that the nicotine in cigarettes is highly addictive, that substances in cigarette tar cause lung cancer, and that no substantial medical or scientific doubt existed on these crucial facts. Nevertheless, motivated primarily by a professed desire to generate wealth, Philip Morris, in concert with other major American tobacco companies, consistently endeavored through calculated misrepresentations to create doubts in the minds of snickers , especially addicted smokers such as Richard Boeken, that cigarettes are neither addictive nor disease-producing. . .
Philip Morris's doubt-creating scheme fully succeeded in the case of Mr. Boeken and others . . .
The evidence further indicates that Philip Morris monitored the relative market share of its Marlboro brand - the brand smoked by Boeken from his teens - to insure it maintained dominance among underage smokers to whom cigarettes could not be sold legally. . .
Citing the Public Health Cigarette Act of 1969, 15 U.S.C. 1331 et seq:, Philip Morris argues that Congress has determined "that it is not reprehensible ... to market and advertise cigarettes with the warning prescribed in that statute." Philip Morris is not being punished for marketing cigarettes, but rather for engaging in a fraudulent business scheme initiated long before passage of the Act. . .
Philip Morris's conduct was in fact reprehensible in every sense of the word, both legal and moral. -- Charles W. McCoy, Jr.

2001-08-11: SETTLEMENT: National Conf. of State Legislators report finds only 5% of state tobacco settlement monies go to tobacco control. NCSL's PR Release is titled: "Health Programs Benefit from Tobacco Money" (36% went to health services and long-term care).

2001-08-22: UK: The Guardian publishes new smuggling allegations against BAT, backed up by documents from whistleblower Alex Solagnier,; Conservative Party leadership candidate and BAT spokesman Kenneth Clarke is attacked.

2001-08-24: BAT breaks into Vietnam market. BAT announces that it has been granted a license for a $40 million joint venture with Vintaba to build a processing plant in Vietnam

2001-09-11: International Tobacco Products Marketing Standards Agreement is signed JT, BAT and Philip Morris agree that the promotion and distribution of tobacco products should be "directed at smokers and not at youth," and should be "consistent with the principle of informed adult choice." The agreement will go into effect in Dec., 2002.

2001-10-16: US Court of Appeals (First Circuit) reinstates a Massachusetts law that requires tobacco companies to disclose the ingredients in their products.

2001-11-05: BUSINESS: Brown & Williamson begins test-marketing Advance, its "reduced risk" cigarette, in Indianapolis, using the slogan, 'All of the taste, less of the toxins.'

2001-11-05: BUSINESS: Vector heralds Omni, its "reduced risk" cigarette, with an ad in Monday's People Magazine, with the tagline, "Reduced carcinogens. Premium taste."

2001-11-01: CANADA raises tobacco taxes by C$1.50; some provinces increase their own taxes on top of the federal increase.

2001-11-02: INDIA's Supreme Court rules that smoking in public spaces must be banned country-wide.

2001-11-15: BUSINESS: Philip Morris proposes changing its corporate name to Altria, which would consist of Miller Beer, Kraft Foods, and the two cigarette branches, Philip Morris USA and Philip Morris International.

2001-11-26: LITIGATION: Philip Morris files appeal of Engle verdicts.

2001-11-29: Beatle George Harrison dies of lung cancer. He had been battling various forms of the disease for at least three years: In 1998, he underwent radiation therapy for throat cancer, which he attributed to years of smoking.
In their December l0th issues, both Time and Newsweek extensively covered Harrison's death, but neither magazine mentioned smoking. Both magazines carry tobacco ads.

2002-02-22: LITIGATION: Burton wins suit in Kansas. RJR and B&W are found guilty of failing to warn about the risks of smoking before warning labels appeared in the 1960s. Jurors found that David Burton's peripheral vascular disease (PVD), which caused him to lose both his legs, was caused by smoking. They ordered R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. to pay $196,416 in compensatory damages and Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. to pay $1,984 for Burton's medical bills and economic losses.
Reynolds also was found liable for punitive damages for fraudulently concealing the risks and addictiveness of smoking, according to the unanimous verdict. This is the first time the industry has lost 1) in the MidWest; 2) in a federal court (except for Cipollone, which was overturned on appeal); 3) in connection with PVD.

2002-04-11: CDC estimates smoking health and productivity costs reach $150 billion a year, according to a new study published in this week's WMMR. CDC estimated the total cost of smoking at $3,391 a year for every smoker, and even itemized the per-pack health/productivity costs at $7.18/pack. Further, it estimated the smoking-related medical costs at $3.45 per pack, and job productivity lost because of premature death from smoking at $3.73 per pack.

2002-05: U.S. appeals court affirms a lower court's decision and orders UST to pay a $1.05 billion award for illegally monopolizing the market for moist snuff.

2002-05-31: World No-Tobacco Day. Slogan: "Tobacco-Free Sports: Play it Clean."

2002-06-05: LITIGATION: Oregon Court of Appeals reinstates $80B Williams award. "[D]efendant's narrow focus on the ratio between punitive and compensatory damages ignores the underlying purpose for awarding punitive damages, which is to punish and deter a wrongdoer. The reprehensibility of the defendant's actions, the number of people affected or potentially affected, and indications that the defendant will not change its actions without punishment are all relevant factors. It is also clear that the defendant's wealth is an important consideration; an award that might be a serious punishment for one defendant could be only a minor inconvenience for another."

2002-06-06: LITIGATION: California judge fines RJR $20 million for violating the 1998 tobacco settlement by targeting youths in a magazine advertising campaign. The campaign appeared in a number of youth-oriented magazines such as Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, etc. "RJR saw itself losing market share, especially to Philip Morris, and believed it had to be more aggressive than the other tobacco companies in its advertising so as not to lose any more market share even though the likely effect of these efforts was to cause significant exposure to youth . . It was, or should have been apparent to the skillful and bright people who managed RJR's multimillion-dollar, sophisticated print advertising campaign that youth were exposed to
tobacco advertising at levels substantially similar to targeted adult smokers.'' San Diego County Superior Court Judge Ronald Prager wrote in his opinion.

2002-06-18: LITIGATION: Florida jury rules for French in Broin spinoff; nation's first award over secondhand smoke. In a Broin spinoff case, the jury in Circuit Court in Miami found for Lynn French, a flight attendant who claimed her chronic sinusitis was the result of exposure to secondhand smoke while working on flights in the 1970s and 80s, and awarded her $5.5M in damages. 2 previous Broin cases were not successful.

2002-06-23: TOBACCO CONTROL: FRANCE: French health officials air ad warning about the ingredients in a "dangerous product." Half a million people call the hotline to learn what the product is: cigarettes.

1933: The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933. Tobacco farmers were being ruined as the market dropped, manufacturers hid their purchase plans and banks charged interest rates of up to 37%. 25% of all families in North Carolina were on relief as farmers appealed to the sympathetic Roosevelt administration. The Agricultural Adjustment Act guarantees price supports in exchange for limiting production via allotments and quotas; so long as farmers didn't grow past their seasonally allotted acreage, the government would buy the unsold tobacco. The plan is dependent on close communication with manufacturers, and their upcoming buying needs. The bill has undergone many amendments over the years, the most important being the 1938 bill authorizing marketing quotas and the 1949 act authorizing price supports.

1935: The Tobacco Inspection Act is enacted by Congress. This act established the framework for development of official tobacco grade standards, authorized the Secretary of Agriculture to designate tobacco auction markets where tobacco growers would receive mandatory inspection of each lot of tobacco to determine its grade and type, and provided for the distribution of daily price reports showing the current average price for each grade. The Agricultural Marketing Service's Tobacco Division was established to provide these services to the industry. (Other authorizing legislation: The Tobacco Adjustment Act; Public Law 99-198, Section 1161; The Naval Stores Act

1969: Congress enacts the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act of 1969, which amends the 1965 Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act to require the following warning: "The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking is Dangerous to Your Health." The 1969 act also includes the phrase: "(b) No requirement or prohibition based on smoking and health shall be imposed under State law with respect to the advertising or promotion of any cigarettes the packages of which are labeled in conformity with the provisions of this Act."

1970-04-01: REGULATION: The Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act had been passed in 1969; The bill as signed into law by Richard Nixon on April 1, 1970 had been the result of over a year of fierce wrangling among the tobacco companies, broadcasters (who stood to lose a great deal of advertising income), the FTC, the FCC and Congress.

1971: REGULATION: UK Government bans cigarette advertisements on radio

1971-05: Charles E. Dederich, founder and head of Synanon, decided not only to stop supplying his community of ex-heroin addicts cigarettes without charge but also to ban smoking on Synanon property. The next year is one of the most tumultuous in Synanon's history to that point. About 100 people left. At least one member told the New York Times that quitting tobacco was much harder than quitting heroin.

1973: REGULATION: Congress amended the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act to ban TV and radio advertising of little cigars.

1982: REGULATION: Congress passes the No Net Cost Tobacco Program Act, requiring the government's Commodity Credit Corporation, which pays for the government tobacco purchases, to recover all the money it spends on quota enforcement, price supports, and leaf grading programs. Now taxpayers no longer pay for losses incurred by the program, though they still pay about $16 million a year in administrative costs to run it.

1984: The Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act was amended to require that one of the four warning labels listed below appears in a specific format on cigarette packages and in most related advertising. Here's the US Code

1985: Tobacco Improvement Act of 1985. Price supports for tobacco were reduced by this legislation and domestic tobacco manufacturers were required to purchase existing loan stocks. In addition, the price support and quota formulas were revised in an effort to generate more market-oriented price and production levels.

1995: It is still legal to advertise cigars, pipe tobacco and hard liquor on TV.

In 1494, Romano Pane, the friar who accompanied Columbus, reported that the Indians also used tobacco by reducing it to a powder that "they take through a cane half a cubit long: one end of this they place in the nose, and the other upon the powder."

--from The Facts About Smoking, Consumer Reports Books, 1991

The Arawak tribe of the Caribbean smoked both cigars and used the tobago, a soapstone pipe. In the North, Native Americans wrapped tobacco in corn husks or stuffed it into hollow reeds to smoke.

"There is an herb called uppowoc, which sows itself. In the West Indies it has several names, according to the different places where it grows and is used, but the Spaniards generally call it tobacco. Its leaves are dried, made into powder, and then smoked by being sucked through clay pipes into the stomach and head. The fumes purge superfluous phlegm and gross humors from the body by opening all the pores and passages. Thus its use not only preserves the body, but if there are any obstructions it breaks them up. By this means the natives keep in excellent health, without many of the grievous diseases which often afflict us in England.

"This uppowoc is so highly valued by them that they think their gods are delighted with it. Sometimes they make holy fires and cast the powder into them as a sacrifice. If there is a storm on the waters, they throw it up into the air and into the water to pacify their gods. Also, when they set up a new weir for fish, they pour uppowoc into it. And if they escape from danger, they also throw the powder up into the air. This is alwavs done with strange gestures and stamping, sometimes dancing, clapping of hands, holding hands up, and staring up into the heavens. During this performance they chatter strange words and utter meaningless noises.

"While we were there we used to suck in the smoke as they did, and now that we are back in England we still do so. We have found many rare and wonderful proofs of the uppowoc's virtues, which would themselves require a volume to relate. There is sufficient evidence in the fact that it is used by so many men and women of great calling, as well as by some learned physicians."

--Thomas Hariot, A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, directed to the investors, farmers, and well-wishers of the project of colonizing and planting there. Imprinted at London in 1588.

Hariot was part of a group sent by Sir Walter Raleigh to establish the first English colony in the New World. He spent a year on Roanoke Island, 1585-1586.

Most of the members of the party fitfully searched around for gold, and complained "because they could not find in Virginia any English cities, or fine houses, or their accustomed dainty food, or any soft beds of down or feathers." But Hariot, who would be recognised in later years as a preeminent scientist, took accurate stock of the land and its bounties, and is reputed to have carried back with him on Sir Francis Drake's ship two strange plants: tobacco, and the potato.

The piece quoted above is part of a compendium of "commodities" he wrote to help maintain interest in Raleigh's doomed attempts to make money out of his expeditions to the New World--the English explorations then were very much commercial ventures.

After Hariot's return to England, he met and became great friends with Raleigh, and was his main contact with the outside world during the 13 years Raleigh spent in the Tower of London (where he grew his own tobacco).

Raleigh was beheaded in 1618, and reportedly had a pipeful just before going to the gallows.

Hariot suffered terribly from a "cancerous ulcer of the nose" from 1615 till his death 6 years later in 1621 at the age of 61. [Juraj Korbler says Hariot had "cancer of the lip" in "Thomas Harriot (1560-1621), fumeur de pipe, victime du cancer?" Gesnerus 9 (1952): 52-54]

Into the woods thenceforth in haste shee went,
To seeke for hearties that mote him remedy;
For she of hearties had great intendiment,
Taught of the Nymphe which from her infancy
Her nourced had in trew nobility:
There, whether yet divine Tobacco were,
Or Panachea, or Polygony,
She fownd, and brought it to her patient deare
Who al this while lay bleding out his hart-blood scare.

The first book in the English language devoted to the subject of tobacco was anonymously published in 1595, by Anthony Chute. It has the simple title "Tabacco," and contains an illustration of an Englishman smoking a clay pipe. In this little work for laymen, the author earnestly urged smokers not to abuse the kindly weed, upheld its medicinal uses, and suggested that physicians were trying to keep smoking a secret among themselves. The reason was, he said, that a moderate use of the pipe was of such value in preserving health that it was likely to make physicians unnecessary!-- from Early Literature of TOBACCO by George Arents

"Smoking is a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless." -- James I of England, "A Counterblaste to Tobacco."

In his treatise, James also noted that autopsies found smokers' "inward parts" were "infected with an oily kind of soot." James also said if he ever had the Devil to dinner, he'd offer him a pipe.

With regards to second-hand smoke, James said, " "The wife must either take up smoking or resolve to live in a perpetual stinking torment."

On the other hand, James' was the first government to find taxes on tobacco to be enormously profitable. Trying to stamp out smoking, he first increased taxes on tobacco 4,000%, from 2 pence/pound to six shillings, 8 pence/pound. That stopped people from buying tobacco, but dried up the funds that had been coming into the Treasury. James then slashed taxes down to 2 shillings/pound and watched the money pour in. Other governments were quick to learn the same lesson.

From George Arents:

In 1604, there was published [in England], anonymously, the most famous of all tracts opposing the social use of tobacco, A Counterblaste to Tobacco, by King James.

The king reiterated his contempt for those who daily used a drug for pleasure, scorned the acceptance of a habit adopted from unbaptized barbarians [Indians in the Americas], bewailed the cost of what he called this "precious stink," and repeated some of the tales of hoor then used to frighten smokers. Among other things, he reminded his readers that some great tobacco-takers were found, upon dissection, to have lungs and brains covered by fine, black soot, obviously the result of smoking!

I should like to make a brief digression here to point out that, as James' subjects didn't accept his advice, he promptly raised the tobacco duty by four thousand percent. But within two years he found it profitable to reduce the duty and lease of monopoly of that tax. Thus he received a large income from the sale of the very thing he professed most to despise.

As a result of the high duty placed upon tobacco (a duty which was continually advanced during James' and Charles I's reign), a state arose similar to our own, during prohibition days. The common phrases and conditions of that era are also applicable to the tobacco trade in London then; the commodity was "free of duty"; sold by smugglers as "right off the ship"; the dandies knew where the best stuff was to be secretly had; domestic tobacco was doctored to give it the semblance of "Spanish," and the wide advertising smoking received, because of the campaign against it, induced many men and women, who had never smoked before, to take up the custom.

-- George Arents, "Early Literature of Tobacco," privately printed for distribution at The Library of Congress, 1938. In April 1938 the Books, Manuscripts and Drawings Relating to Tobacco from the collection of Arents were on exhibition at the Library of Congress.

Though fitful attempts had been made before, the lasting "plantation" of English culture in the Americas starts here. The first permanent English colony was established in 1607, when the Virginia Company landed another ill-prepared group of adventurers in Jamestown. This sad colony--wracked by malaria epidemics, Indian attacks, intrique, laziness, torture, starvation and goulish cannibalism--could well have failed also, but was arguably saved not just by Pocahontas, but by her husband John Rolfe's cultivation of the desperate colony's only substantial resource: tobacco.

Without the success of Jamestown, the dominant culture south and west of New England could well be Spanish.

1880: 21-year-old Virginian James Albert Bonsack is granted a patent for his cigarette-rolling machine.

The cigarette market was small then; cigarettes were expensive and hand-rolled by the cigarette girls. Most manufacturers didn't see a use for that many cigarettes.

The Bonsack machine had been seen and discarded by the established cigarette manufacturers. In 1883, 27-year-old Buck Duke leased the Bonsack machine on a favored contract. By 1887, once Duke and Bonsack's mechanics had finished tinkering with it, it was capable of reliably rolling 120,000 cigarettes in 10 hours.

This not only takes the cigarette business out of the hands of the cigarette girls, it means that cigarettes can be made cheaply enough to satisfy a mass market.

But the market didn't exist. If he wanted to unload his stockpiling cigarettes, Duke had to create the market, and he used unique and spectacular promotions and advertising campaigns to do it.

The pressures created by the invention of the Bonsack machine led not only to the widespread use of cigarettes as America's favored form of tobacco, but to the modern era of mass-market advertising and promotion.

In 1905, a clumsy attempt at bribery virtually forced the Indiana legislature into prohibiting cigarettes. The measure had been passed by the Senate with the intention of embarrassing certain reform leaders in the House; the House as a whole was expected to hoot it down. However, right before the vote, Representative Ananias Baker dramatically held aloft a sealed envelope and announced that it had been given to him by a lobbyist from the Tobacco Trust, with instructions to vote against the bill, He opened it with a flourish: five $20 bills dropped out. The display seemed to confirm a prediction by the state's largest tobacco dealer, reported in an Indianapolis newspaper a few days earlier, that the trust would "buy up the whole House" before it would permit passage of the bill. Baker left his colleagues little choice but to vote for the bill, lest they be suspected of having been influenced by similar envelopes.
--Smithsonian, July 1989; "In the 1800s, antismoking was a burning issue" by Cassandra Tate

The massive, months-long "The Camels are Coming" campaign builds anticipation for Camels. Camel, like Prince Albert before it, consisted of a then-unique blend of 3 tobaccos, piedmont Bright, a flavored and sweetened burley from Kentucky, and 10% Turkish leaf. The half-price brand (10 cents for 20) is an instant hit, gaining 33% of the market by 1917, and 45% by 1923. Soon after, the American Tobacco Company introduces Lucky Strike and Liggett & Myers introduces Chesterfield, each with similar blends. The "modern" cigarette has arrived.

In a letter to the New York Times dated November 10, 1911, he writes:
The right of each person to breathe and enjoy fresh and pure air--air uncontaminated by unhealthful or disagreeable odors and fumes is a constitutional right, and cannot be taken away by legislatures or courts, much less by individuals pursuing their own thoughtless or selfish indulgence.

Levin was then the director of Cancer Control for the New York State Department of Health. His epidemiological survey of Buffalo patients between 1938 and 1950 appeared in The Journal of the American Medical Association. His shocking and controversial conclusion: smokers were statistically twice as likely to develop lung cancer as non-smokers.

Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC) announces in a nationwide 2-page ad, A Frank Statement to Cigarette SmokersThe ads were placed in 448 newspapers across the nation, reaching a circulation of 43,245,000 in 258 cities.

TIRC's first scientific director noted cancer scientist Dr. Clarence Cook Little, former head of the National Cancer Institute (soon to become the American Cancer Society). Little's life work lay in the genetic origins of cancer; he tended to disregard environmental factors.

From the complaint filed by the state of Florida in its 1995 lawsuit against tobacco companies:

59. In response to the publication of Dr. Wynder's study in 1953, the presidents of the leading tobacco manufacturers, including American Tobacco Co., R.J. Reynolds, Philip Morris, U.S. Tobacco Co., Lorillard, and Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation- ration, hired the public relations firm of Hill and Knowlton, Inc., to deal with the "health scare" presented by smoking. Acting in concert, at a public relations strategy meeting, the participants decided to organize a committee to be specifically charged with the "public relations" function. . . . As a result of these efforts, the Tobacco Institute Research Committee ("TIRC"), an entity later known as The Council for Tobacco Research ("CTR"), was formed.

60. The TIRC immediately ran a full-page promotion in more than 400 newspapers aimed at an estimated 43 million Americans. That piece was entitled "A Frank Statement To Cigarette Smokers" . . .

A FRANK STATEMENT TO CIGARETTE SMOKERS:

RECENT REPORTS on experiments with mice have given wide publicity to a theory that cigarette smoking is in some way linked with lung cancer in human beings.

Although conducted by doctors of professional standing, these experiments are not regarded as conclusive in the field of cancer research. However, we do not believe results are inconclusive, should be disregarded or lightly dismissed. At the same time, we feel it is in the public interest to call attention to the fact that eminent doctors and research scientists have publicly questioned the claimed significance of these experiments.

Distinguished authorities point out:

That medical research of recent years indicates many possible causes of lung cancer.

That there is no agreement among the authorities regarding what the cause is.

That there is no proof that cigarette smoking is one of the causes.

That statistics purporting to link cigarette smoking with the disease could apply with equal force to any one of many other aspects of modern life. Indeed the validity of the statistics themselves is questioned by numerous scientists.

We accept an interest in people's health as a basic responsibility, paramount to every other consideration in our business

We believe the products we make are not injurious to health.

We always have and always will cooperate closely with those whose task it is to safeguard the public health.

For more than 300 years tobacco has given solace, relaxation, and enjoyment to mankind. At one time or another during those years critics have held it responsible for practically every disease of the human body. One by one these charges have been abandoned for lack of evidence.

Regardless of the record of the past, the fact that cigarette smoking today should even be suspected as a cause of a serious disease is a matter of deep concern to us.

Many people have asked us what we are doing to meet the public's concern aroused by the recent reports. Here is the answer:

We are pledging aid and assistance to the research effort into all phases of tobacco use and health. This joint financial aid will of course be in addition to what is already being contributed by individual companies.

For this purpose we are establishing a joint industry group consisting initially of the undersigned. This group will be known as TOBACCO INDUSTRY RESEARCH COMMITTEE.

In charge of the research activities of the Committee will be a scientist of unimpeachable integrity and national repute. In addition there will be an Advisory Board of scientists disinterested in the cigarette industry. A group of distinguished men from medicine, science, and education will be invited to serve on this Board. These scientists will advise the Committee on its research activities.

This statement is being issued because we believe the people are entitled to know where we stand on this matter and what we intend to do about it.

*******

From The Facts about Smoking(Consumer Reports Books

The [tobacco] industry also created the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC). Although the stated purpose of the TIRC was to encourage research on smoking, its chief accomplishment was to put forward the idea that scientists themselves held differing opinions about whether or not smoking was dangerous. For example, in 1954, a front-page article in The New York Times reported that a majority of doctors and scientists attending the American Cancer Society meeting believed that smoking caused cancer, but in the third paragraph of the article a representative of the TIRC is quoted as saying that the poll was "biased, unscientific and filled with shortcomings." In 1954, when Drs. Graham and Wynder reported that tobacco tar painted onto the skin of mice caused cancer, the TIRC countered with: "Doctors and scientists have often stressed the many pitfalls present in all attempts to apply flatly to humans any findings resulting from animal experiments. " Whatever the validity of the TIRC's criticisms, they served to encourage skepticism in the public's mind about scientific reports of the dangers of smoking. The tobacco industry also established the Tobacco Institute, whose avowed purpose was to promote "public understanding of the smoking and health controversy and . . . knowledge of the historic role of tobacco and its place in the national economy." In the first issue of Tobacco News, the institute's president said: "The Institute and this publication believe that the American people want and are entitled to accurate, factual, interesting information about this business [tobacco] which is so important in the economic bloodstream of the nation and such a tranquilizer in our personal lives."

*******

From PR Watch:

Hill & Knowlton's role is described as follows in a 1994 lawsuit, State of Mississippi vs. the Tobacco Cartel:

The presidents of the leading tobacco manufacturers ... hired the public relations firm of Hill & Knowlton .... As a result of these efforts, the Tobacco Institute Research Committee (TIRC), an entity later know as The Council for Tobacco Research (CTR), was formed.

The Tobacco Industry Research Committee immediately ran a full-page promotion in more than 400 newspapers ... entitled "A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers."... The participating tobacco companies recognized their "special responsibility" to the public, and promised to learn the facts about smoking and health ... to sponsor independent research on the subject .... to cooperate closely with public health officials ....

After thus beginning to lull the public into a false sense of security concerning smoking and health, the Tobacco Industry Research Committee continued to act as a front for tobacco industry interests. Despite the initial public statements and posturing, ... there was a coordinated, industry-wide strategy designed actively to mislead and confuse the public about the true dangers associated with smoking cigarettes. Rather than work for the good of the public health, ... the tobacco trade association, refuted, undermined, and neutralized information coming from the scientific and medical community.

There is no question that the tobacco industry knew what scientists were learning about tobacco. The TIRC maintained a library with cross-indexed medical and scientific papers from 2,500 medical journals; as well as press clippings, government reports and other documents. TIRC employees culled this library for scientific data with inconclusive or contrary results regarding tobacco and the harm to human health. These were compiled into a carefully selected 18-page booklet, titled "A Scientific Perspective on the Cigarette Controversy," which was mailed to over 200,000 people, including doctors, members of Congress and the news media.

*******

From Merchants of Death: by Larry C. White

The year 1954 marked the beginning of the cigarette Big Lie. It was in this year that the cigarette companies got together to plot the strategies that would keep them viable far into the future, strategies that still guide their response to the fact that their products kill 10 percent of their customers.

Speaking frankly to investors in June of 1954, O. Parker McComas, then president of Philip Morris, said that the health problem must be taken seriously--that is, "carefully evaluated for its effect on industry public relations, as well as its effect on the consumer market." Therefore, he said, Philip Morns had joined with "practically all elements of industry" to form the Tobacco Industry Research Committee. There were great expectations for the TIRC: "We hope that the work of TIRC will open new vistas not only in research, but in liaison between industry and the scientific world." As for the nature of the TIRC, McComas said that it was similar to other industries' organizations such as the American Meat Institute, the American Petroleum Institute, and so on.

This was not for consumption by the general public, of course. An ad was run in newspapers across the country on January 4, 1954, that announced the formation of the TIRC and touted the committee's objectivity. "In charge of the research activities of the Committee will be a scientist of unimpeachable integrity and national repute. In addition, there will be an Advisory Board of scientists disinterestedin the cigarette industry. A group of distinguished men from medicine, science, and education will be invited to serve on this Board. These scientists will advise the Committee on its research activities."

***

There would be no pro-cigarette studies funded by the committee--fakes would be too easily discredited. Instead, research would be done around the periphery--keeping scientists busy on incidental issues, diverting attention from the main point: the link between cigarettes and disease. For example, one of the committee's first priorities was funding of studies on why people smoke. Another favored area for research was whether some people have a genetic predisposition to cancer. This could keep scientists busy indefinitely.

Still, it was obvious that independent scientists would continue to investigate the health effects of smoking. . . The basic public relations strategy was to emphasize the few studies that did not prove that smoking caused disease. What could never be mentioned was that a study that does not prove a relationship between smoking and disease cannot logically prove the opposite--that no relationship exists. . . With the advent of the TIRC, the cigarette companies could say that no one spent more on research on smoking and health than they did. Most important, the TIRC would serve the function of creating a controversy. The current name of the committee is the Council for Tobacco Research and it still serves the function of making it seem like there is a valid difference of opinion among scientists about whether smoking is dangerous.

The value of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee to the industry was revealed only a few months after its creation. At a meeting in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in early June of 1954, the American Cancer Society announced that a majority of cancer researchers, chest surgeons, and pathologists believed that smoking might lead to lung cancer. This news was carried on the front page of The New York Times on June 7, 1954. But, unlike pre-1954 articles that had allowed the news to stand alone, this article included in its third paragraph a denunciation of the statement.

Timothy V. Hartnett, chairman of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, called the poll of doctors "biased, unscientific and filled with shortcomings."

***

In February of 1956, Dr. Evarts A. Graham reported on another study in which he had painted mice with tobacco tars. He had been criticized for his earlier study of this kind because he had used only one type of mouse. In this new study he used other strains and also painted rabbits' ears with the tars. Again, he induced cancer.

This time the industry was ready for him--thanks to the Tobacco Industry Research Committee. When newspapers reported Dr. Graham's study they also reported the response of the TIRC: "Doctors and scientists have often stressed the many pitfalls present in all attempts to apply flatly to humans any findings resulting from animal experiments." To a scientist, the response was worthless, but it was enough to cast doubt in the public's mind. Most important for the industry, the TIRC provided smokers with some ammunition, some arguments that justified their not quitting.

In context, Yeaman was concerned about the upcoming Surgeon General's report, and was writing of "the so-called 'beneficial effects of nicotine': 1) enhancing effect on the pituitary-adrenal response to stress; 2) regulation of body weight."

Moreover, nicotine is addictive. We are, then, in the business of selling nicotine, an addictive drug effective in the release of stress mechanisms. But cigarettes -- we will assume the Surgeon General's Committee to say -- despite the beneficent effect of nicotine, have certain unattractive side effects: 1) They cause, or predispose to, lung cancer. 2) They contribute to certain cardiovascular disorders. 3) They may well be truly causative in emphysema, etc., etc. We challenge those charges and we have assumed our obligation to determine their truth or falsity by creating the new Tobacco Research Foundation. In the meantime (we say) here is our triple, or quadruple or quintuple filter, capable of removing whatever constituent of smoke is currently suspect while delivering full flavor -- and incidentally -- a nice jolt of nicotine. And if we are the first to be able to make and sustain that claim, what price Kent?

From Smoking and Health:Cigarette smoking is causally related to lung cancer in men; the magnitude of the effect of cigarette smoking far outweighs all other factors... Cigarette smoking is much more important than occupational exposures in the causation of lung cancer in the general population ... Cigarette smoking is the most important of the causes of chronic bronchitis in the United States, and increases the risk of dying from chronic bronchitis and emphysema ... Although the causative role of cigarette smoking in deaths from coronary disease is not proven the Committee considers it more prudent from the public health viewpoint to assume that the established association has causative meaning than to suspend judgment until no uncertainty remains.

President John F. Kennedy had won the 1960 Presidential election by only 0.1 percent of the vote. His vice-president, Lyndon Johnson had successfully delivered the crucial Southern vote. Kennedy had an ambitious program to implement, and was fully aware many congressional committees were dominated by tobacco state legislators.

Yet the 1962 Royal College of Physicians' Report increased public pressure on Kennedy to take a public stand. At a press conference on May 23, 1962, Kennedy said in reply to a question on the subject, "That matter is sensitive enough and the stock market is in sufficient difficulaty without my giving you an answer which is not based on complete information, which I don't have, and, therefore, perhaps I will be glad to respond to that question in more detail next week."

Kennedy soon acceded to American health groups' long-standing request to create a Presidential Commission to study the matter.

Surgeon General Luther Terry worked closely with the tobacco industry on the commission. The industry was presented with a list of 150 "outstanding medical scientists" and were allowed to cross out any names they wished. Terry remembers only 3 or 4 were so eliminated. Industry views were made known to the committee members.

The scientists worked for a year in a sub-basement of the Nataional Library of Medicine in Bethesday, MD., and when their report was to be printed, it received the same clasification as a state secret.

On a carefully-chosen Saturday morning (to prevent a disastrous slide on Wall St.), January 11, 1964, at 9 AM, 200 reporters were physically locked into the State Department's auditorium to hear a two hour briefing by surgeon general Dr. Luther L. Terry and a panel of experts. The top-secret measures were felt necessary because of the bold and closely-guarded conclusion reached in a 357-page brown paperback book the reporters received titled Smoking and Health.

When the press conference was over, the reporters ran madly to the telephones. In 1964, in a country where over 50% of adult males smoked, a multi-billion dollar industry seemed to hang by the book's astounding verdict: smoking causes cancer.

Cigarette smoking is a health hazard of sufficient importance in the United States to warrant appropriate remedial action.

At the time, 46% of all Americans smoked; smoking was accepted in offices, airplanes and elevators, and TV programs were sponsored by cigarette brands.

Within 3 months of Terry's report, cigarette consumption had dropped 20%, but, as was the pattern in England following the Royal Physicians' Report, was soon to climb back with a vengeance.

"It was a very dramatic and courageous thing to do," said Joseph Califano, the top domestic policy aide to then-President Johnson.

But the Johnson Administration had enough wars--domestic and foreign--to fight. The Administration didn't want to pull its resources from poverty and civil rights to undertake action which would undoubtedly entail severe social, economic and regional disruptions. "We wanted to get schools integrated, the voters' rights act passed, fair housing passed. And all of those things required us to take on the whole phalanx of Southern states," Califano said.

Smoking rates since 1965, from National Health Interview Surveys compiled by the U.S. Office on Smoking and Health.

1964: USA: In response to the release of the Report to the Surgeon General in Jan. 1964, "World Tobacco" magazine published a two page article (pp. 19-20) titled "International perspective on smoking and health" in the March 1964 issue. It ended with a review of the 25 years of research conducted by Dr. H. Aschenbenner of W. Germany, the Secretary General of the International Association of Scientific Tobacco Research whose work suggests that "before reports on smoking and health are taken seriously, those making the reports should have psychiatric certification that they are not suffering from pyrophobia (fear of fire)". His works "have proven that tobacco antagonism often springs from a morbid (and often unconscious) pyrophobia -- a phenomena whose many manifestations include suppressed fear of the 'big fire' or atom bomb." -- contributed by Larry Breed

Noted commercials include one in which a young boy is seen smoking his dad's discarded cigarette, a light-hearted Gene Kelly spot, and a heartfelt plea by William Talman, who played the prosecuting attorney in the Perry Mason TV series:

I have lung cancer. Take some advice about smoking and losing from someone who's been doing both for years. If you haven't smoked, don't start. If you do smoke--quit. Don't be a loser.

Talman died before the commercial aired.

Cigarette consumption declines each year for the next 4 years, for the first time in a century when cigarette consumption rose almost yearly. Some credit these commercials with helping as many as 10,000,000 Americans quit smoking between 1967 and 1970.

When the federal government moved to ban TV cigarette advertising, the industry did not fight it. Many credit their acquiescence to these commercials

In a survey of leading national magazines, the Columbia Jounalism Revue in 1978 is unable to find a single article in 7 years of publication that would have given readers an clear notion of the nature and extent of the medical and social havoc being wreaked by the cigarette-smoking habit . . . one must conclude that advertising revenue can indeed silence the editors of American magazines.

January 2, 1971. Delayed for one day to allow a final glut of College Bowl ads, the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act of 1969, which included a nationwide ban on tobacco advertising on television and radio, went into effect at midnight. Fairness Doctrine anti-smoking ads also disappear.

"It was going to be a whole new world now," recalled the company's acknowledged ad wizard, Jack Landry. As his farewell gesture to the medium he had used so effectively, Landry scheduled a ninetysecond Marlboro commercial, to begin at 11:58.30 and end precisely at the stroke of midnight. He sat home alone by his television set, watched four of his beloved cowboys gallop off into the sunset for the last time, and wept. "A lot of the excitement went out of the business then," George Weissman recalled. (RK)

Cigarette sales begin rebounding from their four year decline.

The bill also required an updated warning on cigarette packages: "Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking is Dangerous to Your Health."

The tobacco industry is reputed to have been hard-hit by the counter-ads required by 1967's Fairness Doctrine, which undoubtedly influenced their acceptance of this legislation. Feeling betrayed, advertising, broadcasting and publishing interests fought a losing battle.

The industry's advertising expenditures decreased over the next two years, but the industry soon found other venues in which to market: sports promotion, point-of-sales promotions, and increased use of the print medium.

RJ Reynolds' top-selling Winston brand, which had been eclipsed in the 60s by Philip Morris' Marlboro, was particularly hard-hit. While the sales impact of the Marlboro cowboy translated into print beautifully, Winston's identifier was a catchy if notedly ungrammatical jingle, "Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should."

Reynolds never found an effective visual substitute for their jingle.

Throughout the 70s Reynolds became distracted with myriad diversification missteps, and developed business practices which led to shelves full of stale Winstons.

Philip Morris quickly became the number one tobacco company in the US, and its Marlboro brand became the number one best-selling cigarette..

The suffering and shortening of life resulting from smoking cigarettes have become increasingly clear as the evidence accumulates. Cigarette smoking is now as important a cause of death as were the great epidemic diseases such as typhoid, cholera, and tuberculosis that affected previous generations in this country. Once the causes had been established they were gradually brought under control ... But despite all the publicity of the dangers of cigarette smoking people seem unwilling to accept the facts and many of those who do are unwilling or unable to act upon them.

The film, contrasting Marlboro promotions with interviews with cowboy smokers dying of lung ailments, was shown in Britain, but legal problems erupted with Philip Morris. In an out-of-court settlement, Thames turned over all copies save one to PM. The sole remaining copy was to stay sealed in Thames' vault, and terms of the settlement were to remain secret. The film was sent to Stanton Glantz in 1982, and soon after was shown all over the USA.

Deaths from coronary heart disease are responsible for about half of the total excess deaths among cigarette smokers and are numerically greater than the excess deaths from either lung cancer or chronic bronchitis... That the association between smoking and heart disease is largely one of cause and effect is supported by its strength and consistency, its independence of the other risk factors, its enhancement in those smokers who inhale, and by the progressive lessening of the risk in those who give up.

Cigarette smoking is causally related to lung cancer in both men and women... is a significant causative factor in cancer of the larynx... is a significant causal factor in the development of oral cancer... is a causal factor in the development of cancer of the esophagus... is related to cancer of the pancreas... is one of the three major independent risk factors for heart attack... and sudden cardiac death in adult men and women... a major risk factor in arteriosclerotic peripheral vascular disease... a cause of chronic obstructive lung disease... increases the risk of fetal death through maternal complications... contributes to the risk of their infants being victims of the 'sudden infant death syndrome' [cot death].6

The rise in lung cancer death rates is currently much steeper in women than in men. It is projected that ... the lung cancer death rate will surpass that of breast cancer in the early 1980s... The risk of spontaneous abortion, fetal death, and neonatal death increases directly with increasing levels of maternal smoking during pregnancy.

Take the case of Olympic diver Greg Louganis. He trained for the 1984 Olympics (where he was to win two gold medals) at the Mission Viejo training center in southern California. Mission Viejo had been the home of the top American swimmers and divers, including Mark Spitz, who won seven gold medals at the 1972 Olympics.

The swimming club, and the town in which it is located, is owned by a subsidiary of Philip Morris called the Mission Viejo Realty Group.

Greg Louganis was born in 1960. By the time he was eight years old he had started to smoke. He said to a congressional committee studying cigarette advertising, "Smoking was more of a way of rebelling than something I enjoyed. I thought I was cool and that it would make me more grown up--like my parents who both smoked. I thought that my neighborhood pals would accept me if I joined the guys every day outside school to sneak a smoke. By the time I was in junior high, I was hooked on these deadly products, and I was willing to risk whatever future I might have had as a diver and an athlete, all to get my daily fix of those little tobacco sticks. I know now from reading the statistics on nicotine addiction and smoking habits that 85 to 90 percent of smokers start before or during their teenage years. As a diver I kept rationalizing that I didn't need a great amount of wind to succeed, just power and strength."

Louganis continued to smoke until he was twenty-three, even though he had to do it surreptitiously: "My diving coach at the time, Dr. Sammy Lee, would never coach me again if he ever found out that I had even contemplated the idea of smoking cigarettes." But then one day he had a personal epiphany that enabled him to quit smoking: "I had been practicing at the Mission Viejo facility one day and on the way out I noticed this twelve-year-old kid smoking. When I asked him why, he said that he wanted to be just like me! He knew I smoked and he figured that it did not seem to affect my diving performance, so he thought it must be all fight to smoke. At that point I began to question what I was doing, and I quit smoking. I realized that in a way I was a 'Marlboro Man' of sons .... "

Louganis later told me, "After I quit I wanted to tell every twelveyear-old that I had quit." So he started doing volunteer work for the American Cancer Society. According to his manager, Jim Babbitt, the Mission Viejo executives were not very happy about this: "They grimaced when the ACS was mentioned."

And they warned Louganis to "keep a low profile." "1 was very disappointed," he says. "Number one, I was acting as an individual and I don't feel that it was right for the company to have the power to say, 'Don't say this, it's against what our company is selling.' Maybe they could say that I was biting the hand that fed me, but I believe that there is a higher value."

Louganis's activities that the Mission Viejo executives and their masters at Philip Morris on Park Avenue found so displeasing reached a crescendo in January of 1984. In that Olympic year, Louganis was asked by the American Cancer Society to be national chairman of its annual Great American Smokeout. Babbitt was very enthusiastic. He told me, "I was pushing for it heavily. I thought this would have made Greg a hero in other areas than diving. It would have been a real coup for him, a great move for Greg and his career. And, after all, he's told me that he considers quitting smoking the greatest accomplishment of his life." An athlete of his stature in that position would have a major effect on the image of smoking among young people.

But it was not to be. Babbitt got the message from the public relations department of Mission Viejo. If Greg were to accept the honorary position from the American Cancer Society, he would be barred from training at Mission Viejo. "It was done very subtly, very polished. But also very definite." Louganis's coach, Ron O'Brien, was the best in the world. The diver could not contemplate competing in the Olympics without his guidance. But O'Brien worked for Mission Viejo.

Babbitt says the threat of Louganis's being sent away from Mission Viejo, away from his coach, was the sports world's equivalent of saying, "I'll kill your mother." And it didn't stop there. Two of the public relations people told Babbitt that if Louganis accepted the Cancer Society invitation, they too would be fired. "Heads would roll," Babbitt says.

Both Louganis and Babbitt agreed that there was really no choice. The diver declined the honorary position so that he could go to the Olympics. Of course, he could not explain why, at the time, since even this would have been considered a hostile act.

The most ironic footnote to this story is that after his great success in Los Angeles in the 1984 Olympics, his first offers for endorsement contracts came from tobacco companies, and a PM subsidiary. Louganis rejected them without discussion.

[Note: the only major endorsement Louganis landed was from swimwear manufacturer Speedo. Their association continues today. Speedo appears to be aware that Louganis has AIDS.]

THE 1991 AFCO Decision ...there is a strong public interest in the respondent being prevented from making the statement that there is little evidence and nothing which proves that cigarette smoke causes disease in non-smokers. Active smokers are likely to be misled or deceived by the statement into believing that theirsmoking does not prejudice the health of non-smokers, particularly small children. Non-smokers are likely to be deceived or misled by the statement into believing that cigarette smoke does not affect their own health or the health of their children. These are serious matters. -- Justice Trevor Morling, Australian Federal Court, February 7, 1991

In 1986, the Tobacco Institute of Australia ran newspaper ads that claimed there was "little evidence and nothing which proves scientifically that cigarette smoke causes disease in nonsmokers."

The Australian Federation of Consumer Organizations (AFCO) brought suit in Australian Federal Court under the Trade Practices Act.

Heavy guns and major resources of both sides were thrown into the case, which lasted 30 months. 320 reports were presented, including evidence from noted ETS-critic and Cato Institute lecturer Gary Huber (The financial connection between Huber's work and the tobacco industry was not revealed until Business Week broke the story in 1994).

The main evidence for the plaintiffs were reports from 1986 by the US Surgeon General, the National Research Council (US), the National Health and Medical Research Council (Australia) and the Froggatt inquiry into health and smoking (Britain).

The court found that even in 1986 there was "overwhelming evidence" that ETS triggers respiratory attacks in children, and "compelling scientific evidence that cigarette smoke causes lung cancer in non-smokers."

In a 211-page judgement, the court found that the TIA's advertised statement breached the Trade Practices Act and was likely to mislead people on the effects of ETS. Justice Trevor Morling granted an injunction which prevented the Tobacco Institute from running similar ads.

The Journal of the American Medical Association said in reference to the case,

"It is not surprising that the tobacco industry, which for decades has continued to obfuscate the causal link between smoking and disease despite massive evidence, should feel threatened by studies that show that nonsmokers may be harmed and killed by their products. After all, in 1991, the evidence that ETS causes lung cancer was reviewed and found, by a federal court in Australia, to be 'compelling.' And it's not surprising that scientist-editors at JAMA, who have read the evidence on both sides, believe that ETS is a great danger to nonsmokers and are depressed by industry tactics. . .

"It is interesting that the judge in the Australian case was generally critical of the narrow approach of the statistical experts called by the Tobacco Institute of Australia, and their tendency to be 'overcritical' of parts of every study while sometimes demanding "unattainable standards" of proof of causation. He was more favorably impressed by the broader approach of the epidemiologists, who stressed the importance of the pattern that emerged from all these studies -- studies 'supported by strong biological plausibility.'"

REP. WYDEN: Let me ask you first, and I'd like to just go down the row, whether each of you believes that nicotine is not addictive. I've heard virtually all of you touch on it--yes or no, do you believe nicotine is not addictive?
WILLIAM I. CAMPBELL (Philip Morris): I believe that nicotine is not addictive, yes.
REP. WYDEN: Mr. Johnston...
JAMES JOHNSTON (RJReynolds): Uh, Congressman, cigarettes and nicotine clearly do not meet the classic definition of addiction. There is no intoxication--
REP. WYDEN: We'll take that as a no. And again, time is short, if you can just, I think each of you believe nicotine is not addictive, I'd just like to have this for the record.
JOSEPH TADDEO (US Tobacco): "I don't believe that nicotine or our products are addictive."
ANDREW TISCH (P Lorillard): I believe that nicotine is not addictive.
EDWARD HORRIGAN (Ligget Group): I believe that nicotine is not addictive.
THOMAS SANDEFUR (Brown & Williamson): I believe that nicotine is not addictive.
DONALD JOHNSTON (American Tobacco Co.): And I too believe that nicotine is not addictive.

1994-05-31: the FTC votes 3-2 not to file a complaint that the R.J. Reynolds "Joe Camel" advertising campaign encourages children to buy cigarettes. Two commissioners issued strongly dissenting opinions.

"Although it may seem intuitive to some that the Joe Camel advertising campaign would lead more children to smoke or lead children to smoke more, the evidence to support that intuition is not there," a commission statement said.

"I have reason to believe that the Camel campaign induced underage people to start smoking and that proceedings against such ads would be in the interest of the public," Steiger said.

Yao said, "There is evidence that the carton character has appeal to minors and that Camel has increased its market share among minors. There is also evidence that the decade-and-a-half decrease in smoking among minors has slowed down in the time since the Joe Camel campaign began."

The FTC's province was to determine not if the ads encouraged kids to smoke, but whether the ads encouraged kids to do something illegal--_buy_ cigarettes.

The Commissioners were forced to act under pressure from attorneys general of 27 states (who urged a ban in Sept. of 1993), the Surgeon General Antonia Novello, and the entire FTC staff (in August of 1993) urging them to ban Joe Camel.

The FTC seemed unwilling to address First Amendment legal issues that are, in the words of one observer, "on the periphery of settled law . . . I think it's an ugly baby that showed up on their doorstep. They don't know what to do with it."

While the decision was pending--with 2 Commissioners having already voted to ban, and the others hanging fire--another observer, Art Amolsch, publisher of the newsletter FTC:Watch, said, "It is a volatile issue, and I have a feeling there are some commissioners who would prefer not to vote, not to go on the record on this."

Had the FTC voted against the campaign, the matter would then have been turned over to an Administrative law judge, leading to a case that probably would have dragged on for years.

Fred Danzig, editor of the trade weekly Advertising Age, said, "We long ago called for RJR to kill the campaign on their own . . . Whether they're right or wrong is hardly the issue anymore because the public perception is that RJR is trying to lure kids to cigarette smoking simply by using a cartoon character."

Some issues that keep the pot stirring:

In 1991, 3 years into the campaign, over half of 3-6 year olds recognized Joe Camel, more than recognized Mickey Mouse or Ronald McDonald. 91% of six-year-olds match Joe Camel with his product, and Camel's share of the kid market had jumped by a factor of 50.

Nicholas Price, the British creator of the image (for an adult magazine in France in 1974), has said he is "mortified" that the character is being used to target kids.

After a 15 year decline, youth smoking rose in 1988--the first full year of the Joe Camel campaign.